Okay Will Get Us Through
by JessieJay13
Summary: It was supposed to be a peaceful protest for werewolf rights, but when the injured deputy Stiles drags out of the fray turns out to have plenty of secrets and an agenda of his own, it might be the beginning of something entirely different and altogether revolutionary.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Back with a new Sterek fic (sorry Merthur readers)! This one's a doozy and actually deals with some really heavy themes (re: murder, emotional abuse, statutory rape, police brutality), so I'm gonna be putting some trigger warnings at the end of each chapter. If you're worried, you can scroll down to the end to check if there's anything in that chapter that might trigger you or otherwise freak you out. And if you want a detailed explanation of anything, feel free to PM me for more details! I check my inbox every day so you won't have to wait long.**

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Downtown was already overcrowded by the time he got there, people flooding the streets and blocking all through-traffic, so Stiles forked out eight bucks to leave his Jeep in a parking garage four blocks over. The stores he passed on the way there were mostly shut down, doors locked and windows shuttered where possible, as if they were all bracing for a storm. Really, it wasn't an unwarranted fear; with the growing tension across the nation, maybe the metaphorical storm was inevitable.

Stiles' phone beeped with an incoming call as he bounded down the garage's stairs and out into the street, already having to dodge people with homemade signs big enough to knock him over. He would've brought a sign of his own, but Stiles' many talents did not include arts and crafts. He managed to get his phone to his ear without having it knocked out of his hand, which, considering his own clumsiness in conjunction with the crowd, he considered something of an accomplishment.

"Hey, Scotty, how's it going over there?"

"Deaton closed up shop for the protest," Scott said, his voice kind of hard to hear over the increasing babble of voices all around.

"Really?" Stiles asked. "I thought the clinic was far enough away to avoid the crowds."

"It is, for the most part, but I think he wants to be ready and on hand if things go south over there. You know he's got triage experience."

Stiles cringed. "It shouldn't come to that, Scott," he said, dodging another wayward sign. "This is a peaceful protest."

"So was the one in Charleston," Scott pointed out. "And the one in St Augustine."

Stiles clenched his teeth; Scott had a depressingly good point. More and more of the protests around the country were sparking off into something more, and each one fed the flames of the next. Five times now peaceful protests had escalated into riots, three of which had ended with gunfire—thankfully they had been of the rubber bullet variety, but honestly those weren't all that much less damaging. Those had all been in the south, though, not the generally more liberal-minded area of Nor Cal.

"That's not gonna happen here," he said firmly. "These are officers trained by my dad, not trigger-happy specists. My dad doesn't hire people like that. And besides, that's exactly _why_ we need to protest in the first place! That people look at a gathering of were rights activists and think 'danger, violence, shoot on sight' is exactly the mentality we need to change."

"I know," Scott said with a sigh that sounded like it reached all the way down to his toes. "But Stiles, really, be careful. I'd be there to watch your back but—"

"No, Scott, it's fine. I get it," Stiles said. "You stay out of the way. If you get outed, you'll never get into your program. You follow your dreams and let me worry about changing the world one cause at a time."

Scott sighed again, even heavier, and all the righteous indignation Stiles had ever felt flooded through him again. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fucking _fair_ that his best friend, one of the kindest and most compassionate people he had ever known, would be barred from getting the job he had wanted since he was five years old just because he was a werewolf. It wasn't fair that Scott still didn't feel safe to tell his girlfriend of over a year what he was. It wasn't fair that Isaac couldn't join the army like his big brother because he was bitten. It wasn't fair that Erica would always be looked down upon for getting the bite that had saved her life.

It wasn't fair that werewolves around the country were viewed with suspicion, were three times as likely to be brutalized at simple traffic stops, faced higher rates of homelessness and job termination, and were banned from holding public office or serving in the military. It was bullshit, every last bit of it, and Stiles would wave all the signs he had to until someone in power started actually reading them.

"It's gonna be fine, Scott," he said, warm and firm and leaving no room for doubt. "Someday everything will be fine. And in the meantime—"

"—okay will get us through," Scott finished for him. He sounded like he might be smiling, and that wrung a smile from Stiles too. "Just be careful out there, bro."

"I will be. Promise," Stiles said. "Now I'm coming up on City Hall. I'll call you later, let you know how everything went."

They said their goodbyes and Stiles stowed his phone. It was getting hard to move through the crowd but Stiles kept pushing, ducking signs and dodging stray elbows with the ease of someone who spent his entire childhood racing through places he wasn't supposed to be and evading capture at every turn. It was a much bigger turnout than he had expected, the Beacon Hills demographic being mostly older people and families with younger children, but it seemed like a lot of the college-age crowd had made the trip in from surrounding schools to say their piece about the latest episode of police brutality, and they'd brought every single one of their friends with them.

Already there were people on soapboxes, dotted throughout the crowd at intervals, some shouting themselves hoarse and others with megaphones in hand. He passed a girl in a leather jacket with flowers in her hair who was rambling off an impressive list of statistics about the rates of abuse towards born werewolf children in foster care, and then a weedy-looking man throwing pamphlets on the intersection of specism and racial profiling by cops. That actually sounded interesting, so Stiles snagged a pamphlet and tucked it in his pocket for later as he skirted around an older woman who seemed to be reciting some sort of spoken word poetry that he wasn't sure was entirely relevant to the subject at hand.

He wasn't surprised to find a police barricade between the throng of protesters and the front steps of City Hall. He _was_ surprised to find more than his dad's deputies manning it. These officers—riot police, his brain oh so helpful provided—were wearing bulletproof vests and carrying actual weapons, looking out over the milling crowd of mostly students like they were waiting for armed insurgents to come screaming out from every alleyway with bombs in hand. They didn't have SWAT anywhere on their gear, but with the way that even regular police forces were being armed and armored nowadays that didn't mean much.

Stiles fought his way to the front until he could pick out the faces of the people standing guard. There were still a few of his dad's people there, closest to the barricade, in their regular khaki uniforms and blessedly gun-free. Ramirez was eyeing the new guys with hearty disapproval on her square face, Hayes was biting her thumbnail and looking like she'd rather be anywhere else, Langton had a hand hovering over his walkie like he was already thinking of calling someone for backup, and Garrison was as unrelentingly stone-faced and distractingly attractive as he always was.

But Stiles didn't let himself be distracted by Garrison's ridiculous bone structure and flawless stubble now. Instead he approached one of his dad's favorites, the one he was lowkey grooming to be his successor someday. Parrish was clenching his jaw hard enough to make tendons stand out in his neck and keeping a much closer eye on the riot squad than he was on the protesters, the stiff set of his shoulders practically _screaming_ how very unnecessary he thought their presence was. He finally drew his sharp eyes away from them as Stiles knocked his knuckles against the sturdy wooden railing.

"Hey, Jordan, my main man," Stiles said, and the fact that Parrish didn't even roll his eyes at the casual form of address was more alarming than anything else. "What the hell's going on here? Dad didn't order this kind of backup, did he?"

"Definitely not," Parrish said shortly. "The Sheriff would've been happy with just a handful of deputies to keep an eye on things. This is orders from on high."

"Someone went over his head?" Stiles asked, affronted on his dad's behalf. "What the hell! Who?"

Parrish shook his head, not even trying to hide his disdain. A chant was starting to rise up out of the crowd, the protesters in the front yelling directly at the over-armored men. Stiles was too far away to hear what the officers were yelling back at them, but if the sneers on their faces and the reactions of the crowd were anything to go by then this particular squad had been absent on the day they taught de-escalation tactics.

"I don't know who gave the order," Parrish said, louder now to be heard over the din, "but it was someone with clout to get these clowns called in at such short notice." He shook his head again, lip curling. "Swear to god, I wore less body armor when I was defusing IEDs overseas."

Stiles snorted even though it wasn't really funny. It meant they were expecting violence when there wasn't supposed to be any, where there definitely _wouldn't_ be any if it was just the BHPD's regular boys, the ones everyone knew and loved and trusted. Instead there were armed militants practically radiating hostility, and was it any wonder that people were starting to respond in kind? Stiles realized he was biting his knuckles again and hastily stuffed his hands in his pockets.

The chant was getting louder, something generic and easy to pick up.

" _Two, four, six, eight, stop the spread of werewolf hate!_ "

There wasn't anything aggressive about it or even particularly confrontational, no different from any of the other chants from thousands of other protests for a million other causes, but the officers were shouting for people to stop, to get back, to calm down and step away from the barricade or face retaliation.

"Can you get them to chill?" Stiles asked; he had to lean in closer so that Parrish could hear him over the rabble, hands clenching at the barricade. Someone ran into him from behind, jostling him forward, and he called back, "Hey, watch it!"

"I'll talk to the captain," Parrish said. "But there's no guarantee he'll listen to a backwater rent-a-cop like me. His words, not mine," he added with a completely insincere smile at Stiles' offended expression. He gave a tight shrug and started pushing toward the big black van with its open doors and milling personnel.

Garrison shifted over to fill in the gap he left at the fence, giving Stiles a nod of acknowledgement like he usually did when they happened to cross paths. Stiles hand slipped off the barrier as he tried to look cool and nonchalant returning the nod, but Garrison had already stopped paying attention to him so at least his moment of awkwardness had no real witnesses.

Someone collided with him again, knocking him sideways and pushing forward despite his cry of indignation. Stiles tried to move out of the way but there was nowhere for him to go without hopping the fence and coming face to face with one of the riot police and he was likely to be arrested if he did that. Another chant was coming up, loud and discordant as it overlaid the previous one in a jumble of indistinguishable words before it won out.

" _Two, three, four, five, let us make it home alive!_ "

Stiles fought to turn around in the press of people, the barrier now digging painfully into his stomach no matter how hard he tried to push back from it. The crowd when he managed to get a good view of it was full of raised fists, punching the sky. He nearly took one to the face and the guy responsible didn't even notice. He squirmed back around to see the riot police a hell of a lot closer than they were before, fanned out in formation with weapons in hand. One of them had a megaphone but Stiles couldn't make out the words over hundreds of people shouting.

A scream cut through the noise, shrill and piercing and over too quickly. The physical surge that went through the throng of people made sweat break out on the back of Stiles' neck as the first real seed of fear took hold. No amount of neck-craning let him see what the fuck was going on, or even exactly where the scream had come from, but once screaming started there was no going back.

Stiles couldn't keep track anymore of what was happening, jostling turned to shoving and so much noise all around that it stopped registering as something that should make sense to his ears. He heard the first shot loud and clear, though, and was too boxed in to even duck, even as his stomach felt like it fell out of his body entirely.

For a second all he could think was " _Scott is gonna be so mad, I said it would be fine, I promised_ " and then there was an elbow digging into his back and he was stumbling, falling into a wall of churning bodies that somehow shoved him upright again before he hit the ground. He couldn't see the barricade anymore, surrounded on all sides by motion and color that wouldn't resolve into something that made sense to his overwhelmed brain, and there was more screaming, more shots, and he couldn't tell which side was pulling the trigger. He pushed blindly, more trying to get space to breathe than to get away from the danger, but he got shoved back again and again, strange hands as rough and frantic as his own.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. It was a peaceful fucking protest, there was no immediate threat in a goddamn chant, and rubber bullets shouldn't leave splashes of blood on the pavement to stain the soles of Stiles' shoes as he fought against the panicked mob. One of those godforsaken signs finally made contact, catching him hard across the shoulder, and the corner came dangerously close to taking his nose out of commission. The force of the blow sent him spinning around and he found himself crashing into the barricade again, much further down the line toward the edge of the square.

Suddenly there was a gap, a straight shot to an open alleyway, and Stiles didn't hesitate to take off for it at a dead sprint. He was halfway there when a gun went off near enough to send him to his knees on instinct, arms over his head and already running down a mental checklist to make sure all his body parts were still functional. He wasn't hit, but a cry of pain nearby told him that somebody was.

Deputy Garrison was a few meters away, one hand pressed against the splotch of red already spreading across his side. Stiles was moving before his thoughts could catch up with him, pushing more terrified protesters out of his way until he could wedge his shoulder under Garrison's armpit just as his knees gave out.

"Come on, man," Stiles said, trying to prop the swaying deputy back up as he cast around in his memory for a first name. "Michael! Hey, Mikey, come on, we gotta get you oughta here, work with me!"

He kept up a steady stream of encouragement as Garrison got his feet back under him and managed to stumble in the right direction. There were still shots ringing out, from the direction of the steps if the persistent ringing in Stiles' ears wasn't confusing him. More screams, the roar of hundreds of pounding feet, even some howls from weres looking for lost pack members. It all ran together into a sort of white noise, largely drowned out by the tattoo of Stiles' heart and the labored breathing of the man leaning heavily against his side.

They made it into the dubious shelter of the alley without any more collisions and Stiles let the deputy slump against the wall, the rough brick of it catching and pulling at his uniform as he slid down to the ground with a groan.

"Oh god," Stiles breathed. He went to run his fingers through his hair and realized halfway through the motion that he had gotten blood on his hands. He felt sick. "Oh god, what do I do, what do I do? Um, okay. 911."

"Won't do any good," Garrison said through clenched teeth, trying to shift himself up into a better sitting position. "They'll be swamped, and an ambulance couldn't make it out here anyway, not with the shooting still ongoing."

"Fuck." Stiles dropped to his knees, random first aid facts flitting through his brain almost too fast to make sense of. Gut-shots were bad, he knew that, too many important organs and blood vessels and shit, but there was nothing he could do about that. _Apply pressure to the wound_ , that he could do. Garrison grunted as Stiles pressed the palm of his hand directly to the bullet hole—fucking _bullet hole_ , real bullet in real flesh with real blood hot and slippery between his fingers—and Stiles muttered, "Sorry."

"No point," Garrison gasped out, trying to push Stiles off with hands gone weak and shaky with shock.

"Stop that," Stiles snapped. "If paramedics can't get here now, then we keep you alive until they can."

"You can't. I won't last long no matter what you do."

"No!" Stiles said, tone brooking no argument. He pushed harder, ignoring the pained but aggravated noise Garrison made; there was no way in hell he was going to watch a man bleed out in a dirty downtown alleyway, that was _not_ on his agenda for the day. Especially not a man he knew, a man he may or may not have been crushing on since he first saw him at the station a few months ago. He would keep him alive through sheer force of will if he had to, he would force the blood back into his body and fucking pump it himself.

Garrison seemed to have other ideas. Instead of letting Stiles fucking _help_ him like a normal terrified dying person, he was grabbing Stiles by the front of his shirt with a blood-soaked hand and hauling him in close, close enough for Stiles to see the dark green spots in the blue of his eyes, to feel the heat of labored breathing against his cheek.

"You're the Sheriff's son," he said, and he shook Stiles when he didn't confirm it quickly enough. "You think like him? You agree with him?"

Stiles mouthed at him, the vagueness of the question not penetrating the haze of panic still fogging up his mind and making him slow. But the intensity of Garrison's stare kept him pinned down and forced a "yes" out of him even though he didn't know exactly what it was he was agreeing with.

That seemed to be enough. Garrison let him go and reached for the front pocket of his uniform shirt instead, blood-slick fingers fumbling on the little button. Stiles stared uncomprehending as he finally got it open and pulled out what looked like a hypodermic needle full of clear liquid. Before Stiles could fully register what he was seeing, Garrison had pulled the cap off with his teeth and jammed the needle into his own neck. Stiles jerked back in shock, falling flat on his ass and skinning his palms, not that he gave a flying fuck about that at the moment.

Stiles had just enough time to wonder what the fuck that was supposed to do for a fucking gunshot wound before he was scrambling even further backwards, away from where Garrison's face was suddenly changing, _shifting_ into something else with fangs and fur and glowing crimson eyes.

Stiles wasn't afraid of shifted werewolves, for fuck's sake, that was practically the whole point of the protest in the first place. Scott shifted at Stiles' house all the time, just stayed that way for hours some days when Stiles' dad wasn't home and he was feeling particularly smothered by the outside world. He let Stiles comb his sideburns because they were super soft and fuzzy and it was a complete non-issue. He was all for shifted werewolves, no doubt about it, so this wasn't fear so much as shock and confusion. Because werewolves weren't allowed to join the police force at all.

The transformation only lasted a few seconds, there and gone in the space of a handful of startle-quick heartbeats, and it left Garrison exactly as he was before, still slumped over and grimacing in pain.

"What the fuck?" Stiles shouted, because what else was he supposed to say? He might have repeated the question more emphatically, just to drive home how very much the situation he had gotten into didn't make any sense at all, but a shower of brick dust from directly over his head reminded him that someone was still shooting in the square outside their haven.

Really, it had probably only been a few minutes in all since the riot had started in earnest, but Stiles' entire body ached like he'd spent days at a flat out sprint, exhausted in a way he wasn't used to. Nevertheless his overwrought muscles engaged immediately and flung him across the alley, closer to Garrison and away from the alley mouth and its indiscriminate violence. His ungraceful approach jostled the deputy and Garrison made another of those hurt sounds.

"Shit, sorry," Stiles said, of half of a mind to try with the pressure thing again before his mouth opened without his permission and repeated, "Wait, what the _fuck_? You can't be a were! I mean, obviously you are, but you can't be! And why aren't you healing? What was the thing in the neck, and why with the blood when you should have been healed by now?"

Garrison huffed and rolled his eyes, as if he had any right to be annoyed in the face of Stiles' completely justified bafflement. "It doesn't matter," he said. "You don't need to know."

Stiles made a strangled noise of indeterminate outrage the likes of which he had never had cause to make before. "No!" he said. "No, you don't get to bleed on me and then not explain anything, fuck that noise!"

Garrison growled, like actually growled, and it was such an obviously were thing to do that Stiles could hardly believe he'd ever thought the guy was human. "I didn't ask for your help," he bit out. He shoved Stiles away with one hand, the other still clutching at the open wound in his side, and started trying to claw his way upright.

"And what was I supposed to do, just leave you collapsed in the middle of a riot to bleed out and get trampled to death?" Stiles demanded. "You could show a little bit of gratitude, you know. You're fucking welcome, dude."

Garrison didn't deign to respond, mostly because he was gasping in pain and sinking back down the wall. Stiles cursed and reached out to prop him up.

"You're still bleeding," Stiles pointed out. "You shouldn't still be bleeding. Honestly, as the were you obviously are, you shouldn't be bleeding at _all_. Seriously, what is _with_ that?"

Garrison's next attempt at pushing him away was weak enough that Stiles could shrug it off, which was alarming considering he should've had superhuman strength. He swore and let his head fall back for a moment, eyes closed as he caught his breath. "Did anyone see me go down?" he asked eventually, and that was definitely _not_ an answer to _any_ of Stiles' numerous questions.

"What? How the fuck should I know?" Stiles asked. "It's a mess out there, in case you didn't notice. Why does it even matter?" Then he shook his head. "Of course it matters," he muttered, more to himself than to Garrison. "You were pretending to be human. And if you had been human, then this would have been a fatal shot. So if anyone saw you take it and you turn up in a few days good as new, then they would know you're a were, your cover would be blown, and you'd be arrested."

"I need to get out of here," Garrison said, making another attempt to escape the alleyway for the square—mostly empty by now but almost certainly still blocked off—outside it. He managed to get his feet under him this time but he staggered before he'd made it three steps, a cry of pain forcing its way past his lips.

Stiles caught him with a hand to the shoulder, keeping him from toppling over and hitting the ground again. "Whoa, hey, you're not gonna get anywhere like this," he said. "Not if you're not healing."

"I _am_ healing," Garrison snapped. "Just...not as fast as I usually would."

"And why is that?"

The sound of utter aggravation Garrison let out was oddly satisfying, mostly because that was the sort of noise people usually made before they gave in and let Stiles have exactly what he wanted. True to form, he finally said, "There's a serum. I take it to suppress my wolf."

"Dude, you can do that?" Stiles interrupted, too startled to hold back.

Garrison nodded. "Dampens the senses, lowers strength and speed, and slows healing so I can pass for human. The injection counteracts it but I don't know how long it will take to fully reverse the effects."

"And until then, you're vulnerable," Stiles concluded.

He dragged a hand through his hair and nearly smacked himself when he remembered that his hands were still tacky with half-dried blood, which was now sure to be smeared all over his head. But at this point his shoes were irrevocably stained with it and there were splotches of it all over his shirt and jeans, so he figured there was no point in lamenting a little more of a mess. He was going to need a dozen scalding hot showers to feel clean again anyway, and he had a feeling even that might not be enough.

"Dude, why the fuck would you even do this?" he asked, confusion winning out of everything else for a minute. "Why go to all this trouble just to put yourself in such a precarious position? What's your endgame here?"

"That's classified."

Garrison said it with a completely straight face, no hint of a smile or rolled eyes. Then again, Stiles had seen the guy crack jokes before and he'd always had a very deadpan delivery of sarcasm, so he honestly wasn't sure if Garrison was serious or just being a jerk about it. But this seemed like a lot of effort to go to just for the sake of it. Boyd had wanted to be a cop before he'd been bitten but he would never have gone to such extremes to make it happen, just like Isaac had given up his military ideation. Hell, the only reason Scott was still trying to pursue his dream of medical school was because doctors didn't have anywhere near the rigorous physical examinations that cops did, so, if he was careful and kept his head down, no one would ever have to know.

Unless Garrison was just unreasonably passionate about his career in law enforcement, then there had to be something else going on here. And if it was _classified_ , if he legitimately was under cover in some way, then that implied some sort of organization. Maybe it was a group of rebels seeking to overthrow the government and free the werewolves from oppression, hundreds of operatives infiltrating the ranks throughout the country as they spoke. Or maybe Stiles had watched too many movies lately, who knew, but if there was even the slightest chance that something like that was actually going on, then Stiles wanted in on it.

Before he could make any sort of declaration along those lines, something melodramatic enough to fit the circumstances preferably, a faint wail of sirens crept up on them. Garrison looked genuinely alarmed, the sort of alarm that Stiles had sort of been expecting to show up because of the gaping bullet wound but had been conspicuously absent so far, and he lurched further down the alley, away from the sound of the first responders. Stiles ran after him, worried hands flitting between the wall and Garrison's shoulders and back in quick, awkward succession. It was on the third flailing loop that Stiles realized—

"There's no exit wound," he breathed, worry ratcheting up another notch. "God, that can't be helping the whole not-healing thing; you can't heal if the wound is held open by something, suppression serum notwithstanding. Buddy, we need to get you to a hospital to get that bullet taken out."

"No!" Garrison said and the force he put behind the exclamation had him grimacing in pain, staggering again.

Stiles pushed him up against the wall and held him there, pinning him by the shoulders to keep him fucking _still_ so he wouldn't injure himself even more. "Goddamn it, you're even more stubborn than I am!" he hissed. He ignored the dark look Garrison sent him, eyes flashing a vivid red again—and right, alpha, okay, good to know—and lips pulled back over sharpening fangs, and said, "Look, one way or another, you need help. You can't go back to the station, you won't go to a hospital, and you're too hurt to make it anywhere on your own. That means you need _my_ help, since I'm the only one offering at the moment."

Garrison didn't have a rebuttal for that, just grit his teeth and kept glaring. Stiles bit his lip, turning over options in his head as the sirens drew closer and closer, close enough to make Garrison's eyes flit nervously over Stiles' shoulder. "I have somewhere I can take you," Stiles said, sending up a prayer that this would go well and that Scott wouldn't tear him a new one for it. "Somewhere safe that you can get some treatment. But this is a leap of faith on my part, okay, and I'm gonna need a little something from you in return."

"What?" Garrison asked, reluctance in every tense line of him.

Stiles flexed his fingers where they rested on Garrison's shoulders, thick with muscle and pulled taut with pain, as he ran down the list of questions he could ask in this moment. He had plenty, more than enough to fill up three hours' worth of conversations, but they didn't have three hours. And really, there was one question that had been burning a hole in his metaphorical pocket since the suspicion arose in him.

"Is Michael Garrison even your real name?" he asked.

The man's eyes, suddenly sharp where they had been glassy with shock and pain, flicked up to meet his with uncomfortable intensity. There was a long moment in which Stiles felt like he was being x-rayed, scanned inside and out and judged against some unknown standard, but eventually the clench of his jaw eased a bit.

"Derek," he said. "My name is Derek."

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 **Trigger warnings: protests turned violent and gunshot wounds.**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: (No trigger warning for this chapter, read on with impunity. PS: do you guys like having author's notes at the beginning of every chapter or are they annoying/distracting/boring?)**

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Derek wouldn't tell Stiles the rest of his real name. He just kept repeating that Stiles didn't need to know, that it was none of his business, that he needed to stay out of it, without ever giving a satisfactory reason as to _why_. He didn't use the _classified_ excuse again, though, which Stiles filed away for future reference. If it was actually some secret government conspiracy thing going on, then _classified_ would probably be his go-to response to people not in-the-know. So he could cross legitimate government conspiracy off his list of possible explanations, for the moment at least.

Getting out of downtown was not easy. For one, Derek was still losing blood, though not nearly as much as he had been at first. Counteracting the serum suppressing his wolfiness had kicked up his healing just enough to slow the bleeding and get him back on his feet, but the bullet was still in there, shifting around whenever he moved and doing more damage, and he wasn't improving enough for Stiles' comfort. Their travel was understandably slow.

It didn't help that they had to actively avoid the first responders that were finally making it to the scene. It went against every instinct Stiles had to hide from the police sent to help them and to sneak past the ambulances and paramedics with a GSW on his hands, but after an hour or so he finally managed to get Derek to the parking garage where he had left his Jeep.

He wasn't happy about getting blood on the seats, but honestly it wouldn't be the first questionable stain and he was beyond caring at the moment. He checked his phone with one hand as he pulled out of the garage, heading down the most obscure back roads he could think of to get them to the right place while avoiding roadblocks and lingering police presence. He winced; he had seventeen missed calls and six texts from Scott, all demanding to know if he was okay, and two calls from his dad. He put off answering his dad—the Sheriff was not who he wanted to talk to while aiding and abetting a fugitive from his own department—but he sent a quick text to Scott letting him know he was alive and en route.

Scott was waiting for them on the stairs up to his second floor apartment by the time they pulled into the parking lot. He was pacing along the railing, looking very much like a caged lion instead of the wolf he was, and his hair was spiked up funny from all the times he'd run his fingers through it. Despite the half-worried, half-furious expression on his face, he managed to keep his mouth shut until Stiles had lugged Derek all the way into the apartment and the door was closed firmly behind them. Then—

"What the everloving _fuck_ , Stiles?"

"I know, I know, I know," Stiles groaned, trying his best to lower Derek onto the couch carefully. He was a clumsy person by nature, though, and careful had never really been his forte. Derek did make it to the couch in one piece, but he was white-faced and decidedly unhappy upon landing.

"You go to a protest, get caught in a riot, don't answer your phone for two hours so I think you're dead, and then show up at my apartment covered in blood with a dude with a bullet hole in his stomach?" Scott said, and yeah, it sounded pretty bad when he listed it all out like that.

"I know, Scott, okay? It's fucked up, I get that! Trust me, I definitely get that," Stiles said with a mildly hysterical laugh. "But there are some extenuating circumstances and also a gunshot wound here that kinda requires some medical attention."

"So you come to me?"

"Who else do I know with medical training?"

"Oh, I don't know, Stiles, maybe someone _at a hospital_!"

Stiles rolled his eyes, then grabbed Scott by the arm and physically dragged him into the little semi-attached kitchen. He looked back at their guest and saw that he was frowning more heavily than usual as he watched them go; that lent credence to his theory that Derek's heightened werewolf hearing hadn't been restored yet either. He tugged a protesting Scott around so that Derek wouldn't be able to read their lips or anything and made a shushing gesture.

"Look, I'm sorry, Scott," he whispered. "I know this is crazy and all kinds of illegal and I shouldn't drag you into it, but there's something big going on here. I don't know what it is just yet, but it's _something_ , and you know I can never resist an ambiguous _something_."

"You mean you can never resist figuring out what the something _is_ ," Scott said, crossing his arms over his chest and looking thoroughly disapproving. Luckily Stiles had had many years to immunize himself to that particular look, and it wasn't like he could deny the accusation when it was spot on.

"Best case scenario: he's a guy who just really wanted to serve and protect. A werewolf trying to follow his passion, just like you," he said, and just like that Scott started to melt, sympathy working its way past the anger until his crossed arms fell away and his shoulders slumped. "Worst case scenario," Stiles pressed on, "he's involved in some big werewolf rebellion, dedicating his life to the cause and fighting for a better future. And really, I would argue that that's not even a worst case anything considering the cause in question is near and dear to my heart and completely worth fighting for."

Scott huffed in exasperation, glancing over his shoulder at Derek. "And if that's really what it is?" he asked. "What are you going to do then?"

Stiles shrugged; he hadn't really thought that far ahead, at least not in any detailed sort of fashion. He was more of a broad picture kind of guy where the future was concerned. "Look, are you gonna help us or not?"

Scott maintained a glare for about four seconds before he caved, which was actually a long time for him to hold out against Stiles' best pleading face. He did punch Stiles pretty hard in the shoulder before he went to dig out his extensive first aid kit, though, but Stiles thought that was fair considering the circumstances.

"Go shower and change," Scott said as he lugged the kit back into the living room and laid it out on the coffee table. "You reek, and you're not gonna wanna watch this anyway."

Stiles considered protesting—he had grown out of his thing about blood years ago, he definitely wouldn't pass out now like he had when Scott got his tattoo—but the thought of a hot shower and clean clothes was enough to bring tears of gratitude to his eyes.

He heard the TV click on when he was halfway to Scott's tiny bathroom, volume turned up higher than it usually was. He didn't realize why until he had peeled off most of his layers: it was for the benefit of the neighbors, to cover up Derek's strangled scream of pain as Scott dug his fingers into the wound to get the bullet out. Stiles grimaced and turned on the water; he didn't particularly want to hear that either.

He used up an inordinate amount of Scott's body wash, resolving to buy him more at the earliest convenience, and scrubbed until his entire body was the pink of fresh, clean skin instead of red and brown and grey. Then he just let the hot water run for several more minutes, forehead pressed against the still-cool tiles as he just _breathed_. He didn't stay in there as long as he really wanted, mostly because he thought that he might have a breakdown if given the time to actually think about what had just happened in detail. Instead he turned off the water, toweled himself dry, and stole clothes from Scott's dresser that honestly might have been his at some point anyway.

Stiles emerged to find Scott washing his hands in the kitchen sink, pink suds flooding down the drain, and Derek shirtless, which was just not fair. Granted the shirtlessness was to give Scott access to the wound, but still, that sort of chiseled chest was just insulting. Blessedly, his abs were mostly obscured by a thick swath of white gauze wrapped tight around his middle. Derek had his head leaned back, long neck exposed in an oddly vulnerable position for a threatened were, and his eyes were closed. He still looked pale.

"Hey," Stiles said, quiet as he hip-checked Scott and made him splash water across what little counter space existed in the tiny kitchen. "How's he doing?"

"His healing is still slow," Scott murmured, frowning at Stiles as he snatched up a towel to clean up the counter. "There must have been some kind of wolfsbane in that serum to affect him so strongly for so long."

"But he _is_ healing? He'll be okay eventually?"

"Yeah, he'll be fine. The question is," Scott said, lowering his voice even further, "what do we do with him in the meantime?"

Stiles bit his lip, his thumb tapping out a frantic rhythm against his thigh as some news station on the TV, turned down low now that the loud part of the medical procedure was finished, droned in the background. He was about to start listing options—he always thought better out loud, or at least written down and with copious visual aids—when Derek let out a snarl that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and had Scott whining on instinct.

There was no threat that Stiles could see by the time he got to the end of the couch, no cops busting the door down or anything, but he followed Derek's alpha-red glare to the television. There was an old man on the screen, wrinkled and grey but with a commanding presence, and the byline was scrolling with info about the riot. Stiles fumbled for the remote and turned the volume back up again.

"...unfortunate incident, but it has been taken care of. The situation is contained and now the proper steps must be taken to ensure that no such thing is allowed to happen again."

The header said "Gerard Argent, Attorney General." Stiles had heard plenty about him, both from the press and from his granddaughter Allison, more than enough to know that he was a bigoted prick. That he blamed the weres for starting the riot was obvious, even if he hadn't stated it explicitly. It was enough to make Stiles a little sick to his stomach, and Scott looked ready to punch something, but Derek was something else. His eyes were still glowing and his fangs were dropped, a low growl rumbling in his chest.

The growling stopped as soon as the screen cut to someone else, even though that person was even more explicitly anti-were. Interesting.

Stiles might have commented on that, might have asked what it was about Gerard Argent specifically that set him off, but the obnoxious trill of his phone ringer beat him out. His dad's picture was up on the screen and Stiles groaned long and loud, aggravation and guilt duking it out over which got to make him feel more like shit.

"Dude, you haven't talked to your dad?" Scott asked, horrified.

"I was a little busy!" Stiles shot back with a flail in Derek's general direction; annoyingly enough, Derek was giving him a judgy face too, probably because he worked with Stiles' dad and knew how prone to worrying he was. "Plus! Dad was probably busy too with all the shit going down! I was gonna call him eventually, I swear."

"Well, answer it now before he starts seriously thinking you're dead!"

Stiles stamped his foot in a childish display of frustration that he thought he had earned by now, but swiped to pick up the call anyway. "Before you say anything else, I'm _fine_!"

"Jesus, kid, don't do that to me." His dad sounded tired and old, like he had aged ten years in the last three hours. Stiles winced; he hated making his dad sound like that. He had made an effort to cut down on the occasions when that tone was warranted but honestly there was only so much he could do to curb his own natural tendency toward getting into trouble.

"I know, dad, I'm sorry. I'm didn't even think to check my phone once I got out of the square." It was a lie, but only a little one and it was better than trying to explain his current situation. He wasn't sure if that would end in his dad arresting Derek and grounding Stiles for the rest of eternity, or if it would drag his dad into aiding and abetting a criminal, but both options were better off avoided.

"C'mon, Stiles, you gotta work with me here," the Sheriff said, the sound of papers rustling in the background as he worked with one hand and held the phone with the other. "I've got a dozen people in lockup who don't belong there, the riot squad captain using my ass as a chew toy, journalists breaking down my door, and a missing deputy; I don't need to be worrying about my wayward son too."

Stiles' mouth went dry. "Missing deputy?" He hoped he sounded appropriately worried and not like he was fishing for information. Derek looked up sharply and the tight clench of his jaw screamed frustration that he couldn't hear the other side of the call.

His dad sighed and Stiles could see in his mind the way he would be pinching the bridge of his nose, rubbing at his eyes. "No one's seen Garrison since the riot," he said. "He was on duty in the square, but he hasn't checked in and none of the hospitals have anyone matching his description. He's just gone."

"Wow," Stiles said. "No idea where he might be then?" He saw a lot of the tension leave Derek's shoulders, and the rest of it fled when Stiles echoed his dad's confirmation with a nod.

"Look, kid, can you come down to the station?" his dad asked. "Just so I can see you with my own two eyes? Make sure you're alright?"

Stiles smiled, his chest feeling warm and fuzzy in the way it always did when his dad broke through the tough cop exterior to just be _his dad_ for a minute. "Yeah, I'll be by soon. Promise."

"You've got an hour to make it here," his dad said. "After that I've got a meeting set up that I can't get out of." Just by his tone, it was obvious that the meeting wouldn't be a good one. Stiles really hoped the blame for this whole thing wouldn't end up in his dad's lap, but that was a distinct possibility, and the fact that he couldn't do a damn thing to help grated on him.

"I'll be there." It was the least he could do. "Love you, dad."

"You too, kiddo."

Stiles hung up and turned decisively to face Derek, who actually looked the tiniest bit intimidated by the sheer determination he was sure was on his face. "Alright, I've got less than an hour to figure out what the hell you're up to."

Derek bristled. "It's none of your damn business what I'm up to," he snapped.

"Considering that you're breaking the law, making my dad look like a fool, and bleeding all over my best friend's couch—" Stiles counted them off on his fingers, face screwed up in an exaggeratedly thoughtful expression. "—I think maybe it is a little bit. I saved your life, now I want in on whatever long game you're running."

"How do you know you want in if you don't know what the game is?"

Stiles looked at him long and hard, eyes narrowed as he thought over everything he knew of this man, of Deputy Michael Garrison. His dad spoke highly of him, said he was one of the best, and Sheriff Stilinski was not an easy man to impress. Stiles had seen the deputy at the station, working late into the night on one case or another, refusing to go home until it was closed. For fuck's sake, Stiles had seen the man literally rescue a kitten from a tree once. Whatever he was, werewolf or fugitive or whatnot, he was a good man. And that was more than enough for now.

"Call me nosy, if you want," was what Stiles ended up saying instead. "I've always wanted to be part of an underground rebellion. Always said I'd make a great secret agent. Can I go undercover next?"

Derek opened his mouth, the scowl on his face foreshadowing a diatribe of epic proportions, but he didn't get the chance to say anything. Scott's head whipped up, wide eyes aimed at the door, and he let out a noise of distress. Stiles knew that face; that was the caught-with-his-hand-in-the-cookie-jar-before-dinner face but with an extra dash of panic that was far from reassuring. Scott only made it halfway to the door before it opened.

Allison came in juggling two bags of takeout, her phone, purse, and keys, too busy focusing on her hands to look up and see what she had walked in on. "Scott!" she said. "I got chinese, since you didn't answer my text about wh—"

She dropped everything she was holding and also screamed a little bit. Probably because the tan couch had very dark but still obviously red blood stains on it. But also maybe because Derek was snarling again, eyes redder than the blood, even more wolfed out than he had been at the TV a few minutes ago.

" _Whoa, dude!_ " Stiles said, instinctively stepping between him and Allison, hands raised as if that would do any good in fending off an alpha werewolf in a rage. Then Scott was growling too, wolfed out and falling into a protective stance in front of Allison, who might have screamed again because she didn't even know that Scott was a were, and honestly this was devolving far too quickly for Stiles' liking.

" _Hey!_ " he yelled, loud enough to get everyone's attention onto him instead of each other, since obviously that was only exacerbating the situation. "You," he said, pointing what he hoped was an authoritative finger at Derek, "sit the fuck down and knock it off. You!" Pointing at Scott this time. "Take her in there and tell her everything. It's about time anyway."

There were several more very tense seconds of aggressive posturing from the werewolves, Scott unwilling to back down until he was certain that Allison was safe and Derek still incensed for some completely unknown reason. Then Derek blinked and the red was gone. He slumped back against the couch again, still breathing hard but shifting back to his fully human face. At a shooing motion from Stiles, Scott took a stunned Allison by the hand and tugged her into his bedroom, shutting the door behind them and leaving Stiles and Derek alone.

Stiles just stared at him for a minute, raising his arms out to the sides in a universal _what the fuck_ gesture, and said, "Dude!"

"Don't call me that," Derek said, as if he had any right to dictate the terms of the present discussion.

"What the hell was that?" Stiles asked, completely ignoring him. "Where do you get off practically attacking Scott's girlfriend?"

That got another growl out of Derek, thankfully without all the shifting and unnecessary aggression. "He's dating her?" Derek spat. "Is he out of his mind? She's an Argent!"

"Okay, how did you even know that?" Stiles demanded.

Derek's nostrils flared and his eyes flicked back to the closed door Allison had disappeared behind. It had to be a scent thing then, something about her smell that marked her as an Argent. Stiles tried to smell it himself, but all he got was a faint whiff of something flowery, some sort of perfume. It wasn't exactly offensive to his nose, but apparently to Derek's it was damning.

"Doesn't he know what that family does to people like us?" Derek asked, skipping over Stiles' question.

"Yeah, he knows pretty well," Stiles said. Scott knew better than anyone how bigoted the Argents as a whole were. He'd had to listen to Allison lament her ultra-conservative relatives on a regular basis, and Stiles had had to listen to _Scott_ panic over the fact that Allison's family would never be able to accept them. That's why Scott had put off the conversation he was having right now for as long as he had; he didn't want to know what her father would do if he ever found out, and Stiles wasn't keen on imagining it either. "And he also knows that Allison's not like the rest of her family."

Derek scoffed, a dismissive noise full of disgust and disdain. "Please," he said. "Did she tell him that?"

"She didn't have to."

"They're all the same," Derek insisted. "Liars and specists and—" He cut himself off abruptly, jaw clenching as he looked away. It looked like he was struggling to control himself, to keep from wolfing out again, and Stiles stared a bit more.

This was not a normal reaction. Stiles knew a lot of weres, Scott and Erica and Isaac and Boyd and plenty more, and he had seen them all face some sort of anti-were prejudice. Erica and Boyd had been the victims of violent hate crimes because of what they were, Isaac faced harassment on a regular basis, and every one of them had had their job opportunities severely curtailed. And yet none of them had this visceral of a response, and certainly not focused on one particular family, triggered by nothing more than a specific scent.

"Allison's a good person," Stiles said, softly now; Derek's obvious distress, covered as it was by anger and aggression, had taken the wind out of his indignant sails pretty efficiently. "She is," he repeated when Derek gave a jerk of his head in denial. "We've been friends for years. I know her, and I know she doesn't share her family's views. She would've been at the rally with me if she didn't think she'd be disinherited and thrown out of the house for it."

Derek was looking at him now, eyes trained not on his face but on his chest. Listening to his heartbeat, Stiles realized, though he was obviously still straining with his weakened senses.

"You trust her?" he asked, voice hoarse from all the growling.

There was something about the intensity in his gaze, the way he was searching so hard for any hint of a lie, that made Stiles' heart race, though thankfully it was steady. It stayed steady as Stiles said, "Yes, I do," and Derek's eyes met his. After a long and torturous minute full of that same x-ray-ing sensation from back in the alleyway, Derek nodded.

Having apparently made the decision to trust Stiles—tentatively, at least where Allison's loyalties were concerned—Derek all but collapsed again, hands fluttering uselessly over his bandages as his head fell back. Now that the anger had fled, he radiated exhaustion, and Stiles suspected it wasn't just the physical kind.

Slowly, cautiously, Stiles edged closer until he could lower himself into the ratty armchair Scott had picked up for ten dollars at a sketchy consignment store. The ancient springs squeaked under his weight and Stiles flinched, waiting to see if it would set Derek off on another rage or something. Instead Derek snorted softly, a weary sort of amusement pulling at the corner of his mouth, and Stiles decided he was safe for the moment.

The coast being clear was always Stiles' cue to push the boundaries. "So are you gonna tell me what your mission is?"

Derek sighed, but he didn't open his eyes this time, apparently too tired to get angry yet again. "You don't need to know," he said.

Stiles leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "If there's something going on," he said, "something important, then I can help. Whatever this mission is—"

"It's not some big important thing, Stiles," Derek said. "It's personal. And it's too dangerous for you to get involved."

Stiles bit his lip, brow furrowed as his thoughts chased each other around in his head. He traced the line of Derek's profile, the jut of his jaw, the sharpness of his cheekbone. He lingered on the creases around his eyes and the dark shadows beneath them, on the pale expanse of his bared throat and the bob of his Adam's apple when he swallowed. He said, "Just because it's personal doesn't mean it's not important."

Derek turned to look at him then, his own eyebrows pulled down in consideration, or maybe it was confusion. He didn't say anything and Stiles let him look his fill, hoping Derek found whatever he was looking for in his expression. After a few moments, something of the tightness in Derek's expression eased, almost imperceptible but drawing a small smile onto Stiles' face anyway.

"So you're not gonna claw Allison's face off, are you?" he asked, reasonably confident that he wouldn't get mauled for making the joke now.

Derek gave another of those snorts, because apparently he was above laughing like a normal person, and rolled his eyes. Stiles rolled his right back, exaggerated so that his entire head followed the motion, and sat back in his seat to kick his feet up on the coffee table like Scott always told him not to. He glanced at the still-closed door. He hadn't heard any shouting, and he had kind of been expecting shouting. He bit his lip again, gnawing on it as guilt curdled his stomach again.

"I really hope they're okay," he muttered. He wouldn't be able to live with himself if his reckless decision to bring Scott into this mess cost his best friend the love of his life.

Derek laughed—a real laugh this time, with vocalization and everything!—and said, "I think they'll be fine. It sounds like they're sucking face now, anyway."

Stiles gaped at him in shock, adding in a little flail for emphasis on just how shocked he was. "Dude! 'Sucking face,' really? How old _are_ you?"

"I'm only twenty-four!" Derek said, actually sounding a bit offended.

"Right, sure, whatever, grandpa."

Derek put one of the couch's mismatched throw-pillows to good use by actually throwing it at him. Stiles threw it back, minorly outraged, but Derek caught it before it connected with a smug smirk on his face. Stiles was looking around for something else he could throw, grumbling under his breath about stupid old deputies and annoyingly good werewolf reflexes, when the door to Scott's room finally re-opened.

Allison still looked a bit nervous, but Scott had her hand firmly in his and she followed him into the living room willingly enough. Derek shifted into a more upright position on the couch as if he might still be preparing himself to attack, or maybe to run. He grimaced when he sniffed the air, a shadow of the anger returning before he could push it back down with a shake of his head.

Allison bit her lip, unsure, and then shook off Scott's hand to step forward with her head held high. "I'm Allison," she said, firm and determined. "I don't agree with my family on pretty much anything, and I'm sorry that people like them exist to make life more difficult for you. Also, I'm sorry I sort of shrieked when I came in and saw you; Scott said it hurt his ears."

Derek's eyebrows rose, any lingering anger overridden by surprise. "Um. Thanks?"

Stiles bit back a snort of his own.

"I won't tell anyone you're here," Allison offered. "I have no interest in getting anyone in trouble, especially not for stupid laws that shouldn't be on the books to start with." She smiled, bright white teeth and dimples and all, and Derek's eyebrows slid up another centimeter or so, in danger of disappearing into his hairline. "If you need anything, help or supplies or a ride out of town or whatever, I'm available."

Derek opened his mouth but no sound came out, apparently too stunned to speak. Stiles chuckled under his breath and dug his phone out of his pocket because if he looked at the comically shocked expression on Derek's face for a second longer he was going to burst out laughing and someone in the room would probably hit him for it. The time stared at him accusingly from the lockscreen, though, and he cursed.

"Touching as this Kodak moment is," he said, "I've got somewhere to be and it's time sensitive." He had fifteen minutes to get to the station before his dad had his meeting and it would take him six minutes to drive there. He stood up and stretched his arms over his head, feeling every sore muscle all over his abused body pull and twinge with the movement, various bruises making themselves emphatically known.

"I'll get out of your hair," Allison said easily, grabbing her keys and purse from where she'd dropped them and checking the takeout bags to see if the food was ruined. Apparently she deemed them acceptable, because she put them on the coffee table in front of Derek with another blinding smile. "You're welcome to these, if you want. I don't mind."

Stiles turned away from them, though he made another mental note at how blatantly taken aback Derek was that Allison was being nice to him instead of driving ring daggers into his kidneys or whatever else it was he expected Argents to do, and said to Scott, "Is it okay if I leave him here for a while? He could probably use, like, a six hour nap anyway, so it's not like you need to entertain."

"I have to get to work soon," Scott said, running fingers through his hair and leaving it sticking up all over the place. Allison reached out to smooth it down again with a tsking noise.

"I'll just go," Derek said, trying to lever himself off the couch. He made it halfway to his feet, face twisted in pain, before Stiles and Scott each had a hand on one of his shoulders, pushing him back down again.

"Oh no you don't, you're not going anywhere," Stiles said in his best imitation of his dad's I'm-the-Sheriff-don't-contradict-me tone. Apparently it didn't come across well because everyone in the room rolled their eyes at him, which he thought was a little rude.

"Look," Scott said to Derek. "If I leave you alone here for a while, do you promise not to steal anything or whatever?"

"Scott, dude, he's an officer of the law!" Stiles protested. Then he remembered the whole werewolf thing and the whole fake identity thing and the whole fugitive from the law thing and he shrugged. "Well, sort of."

Derek glared at him, obviously knowing the turn his thoughts had taken and not appreciating it, before turning back to Scott with an impatient sort of smile. "I won't steal any of your shit," he said. "Not that there's anything worth stealing."

Scott ignored that last bit, just grabbing his jacket off the rickety mess of a coat rack he insisting on having. "Your healing should keep accelerating as you metabolize what's left of the serum in your bloodstream" he said as he pulled it on. "Get some sleep and you should be fine before too long."

"And after that, if you need help getting out of the city or whatever," Stiles said, ignoring the way his stomach flipped over funny at the prospect that Derek might leave and never come back, taking his danger and intrigue and disconcertingly intense eyes with him, "I've got a police scanner in my jeep. Very good for, you know, evasion...and...stuff."

He trailed off at the highly judgmental look Derek was giving him, a reminder that, for however long, he had been a real cop and he did not approve of how ready and prepared Stiles was for this particular eventuality.

"Okay, we'll just leave you to your convalescence," he said, shoving his feet into his unfortunately still blood-splattered shoes, snatching up his keys, and following Scott and Allison to the door. He turned back at the last minute. "Oh hey! How would you feel about giving me your login because of reasons?"

Derek frowned. "My what?"

"Your login," Stiles repeated. "You know, at the station."

"Why?" Derek asked, highly suspicious.

Stiles shrugged, trying to exude innocence, or at least harmlessness. "So I can check some things, be fully informed on the stuff dad doesn't want to tell me. Knowledge is power, you know." Derek didn't looked convinced, which was understandable considering it only qualified as truth by the loosest of criteria. "I could just use my dad's, but he always notices when I do that. Yours would be a lot less conspicuous, and I'm kinda hoping to keep a low profile here."

Finally Derek groaned and said, "Fine." He rattled off his username and password with one more dirty look for good measure, which Stiles was too busy fist-pumping the air to notice. Maybe now he could get some real answers, since Derek had been less than forthcoming so far. He didn't need Derek's cooperation to figure out what was going on, just some good old-fashioned detective work of his own. He had methods.

* * *

 **Trigger warning: None**


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: (See end of chapter for trigger warnings.)**

* * *

Stiles' beloved jeep still had Derek's blood all over the seats, but there wasn't much he could do about that at the present time. He made a mental note to call Lydia and ask if she knew how to get blood out of car upholstery and pleather because if anyone would know then she would. She was a little frightening, admittedly, but also a very good resource to have.

He pulled up in the parking lot of the Sheriff's station and dragged a winter coat out of his backseat that had been there for over two years to throw over the front passenger seat, just in case anyone happened to peek in and decided to ask who it was he had murdered recently to make that mess. There was nothing he could do about his shoes, though. At least Scott's clothes were clean, if a bit slouchy and just-rolled-out-of-bed chic.

The station was a mess, an anarchical mess masquerading as something remotely functional. There were haggard-looking deputies all but running in various directions, some laden down with papers and manilla folders, others still ferrying protesters in handcuffs to or from the holding cells. Some of the riot squad members were still hanging around, though they didn't seem to be making themselves at all helpful in any way, the assholes. They were probably the ones who had _started_ this mess and they had the audacity to stand around and drink coffee while the BHPD struggled with damage control.

On his way past the receptionist desk and into the station proper, already scanning the crowd for his dad, Stiles nearly ran smack into someone. At first all he got was a faceful of sandy blonde hair and a whiff of something flowery and familiar while he windmilled his arms and hoped he didn't accidentally smack this person in the face in his attempt to stay upright, but then small, manicured hands were on his shoulders, pushing him back and steadying him at the same time.

"Whoa there, little man!" she said with a laugh. "Going somewhere in a hurry?"

"Yeah, no, not really," Stiles stammered out, only mildly offended at the "little man" thing and deciding not to bitch about it considering he had nearly flattened her. "I'm just kind of a hazard by nature. Sorry, miss…?"

The woman—very attractive woman, honestly, Stiles' thoroughly bisexual self couldn't help but acknowledge—smiled at him and something about it registered in his mind as _sharp_ , though he couldn't put his finger on what or why. "Argent," she said. "Kate Argent."

Well, that explained that. "Allison's aunt!" Stiles said, figuring that was a more value neutral thing to say than "Gerard's daughter," though he was certain that association was more accurate. As much as Allison loved her aunt, she also acknowledged that Kate was as frighteningly conservative in her beliefs and opinions as the rest of her family. "I thought you lived out of town. What brings you here?"

"Yeah, DC usually," Kate told him easily. "I'm in town on business. Heading a task force actually."

A chill ran through Stiles; he couldn't remember what department or alphabet soup organization Kate was a part of, but he was relatively certain that, whichever it was, he wasn't going to like the answer to his next question. "Task force?" He had to stop and clear his throat. "Uh, for what task exactly?"

Kate leaned against Deputy Ramirez's desk, hip jutting out and boot-clad feet kicked out in front of her, and completely ignored the noise of protest Ramirez gave, along with the look of utter disgust leveled at her back. "Tracking down the rabble rousers from the riot," she said, like it should've been obvious, and Stiles' stomach lurched like he'd missed a step going down stairs.

"You know who started it?" Stiles asked, clammy fingers tangling in the hem of his shirt to keep his much-abused knuckles out of his suddenly dry mouth; indulging in a nervous tick was more weakness than he wanted to show in front of this woman, who struck him as more of a predator than any werewolf ever had. "Like for sure?"

Kate flicked her long hair over her shoulder, the picture of disinterest and disdain. "Oh please," she chuckled. "We all know who started it."

The chill of fear in Stiles' stomach—borne of the certainty that things were about to get very bad for a lot of innocent people over something completely out of their control and how thoroughly fucked up that was—curdled into something closer to anger. He chewed on his tongue for a moment, consciously reining himself in. "And who would that be?"

She raised a delicately sculpted eyebrow at him. "At a rally like that? There was so much barking, we all knew the mutts would bite eventually."

Before Stiles even realized he was surging forward—to do what, he didn't know and also didn't care because, whatever it was, she would deserve it—there was a hand clamping down on his shoulder, dragging him back.

"Pardon my son," the Sheriff was saying, something that might've been an attempt at a polite smile but was honestly more of a grimace on his face. "However, I will inform you, ma'am, that we don't use that kind of language around here. I'll ask you to refrain from it as well."

Kate pushed herself upright, her own smile less charming now and more mocking, like they were peasants in her kingdom and they should be glad that she was deigning to acknowledge them at all, much less kowtow to their unreasonable demands. "Of course, Sheriff," she said. "Are you ready for our meeting?"

"I'll be there in just one minute," he said. "Deputy Ramirez can show you to the conference room."

Kate thanked him, her voice practically dripping with insincerity that made Stiles' hackles raise all over again, and then she was sweeping off with a glowering Ramirez on her heel. Another wave of that smell hit Stiles as she brushed past him and it tickled at his nose, niggled in the back of his mind until he could place it: Allison, back at Scott's. Kate was wearing the same perfume that Allison had been. Or maybe more accurately, Allison was wearing a perfume that Kate wore regularly. A perfume that Derek had recognized and reacted very badly to.

Interesting, and frankly a bit alarming in its implications.

Stiles put that thought out of his mind for a minute as his dad pulled him into a hug so tight he swore he could feel his ribs creak in protest. Stiles just hugged him back, sending up a prayer of thanks that his dad hadn't been involved personally in the rally's security and therefore hadn't been in a position to get hurt for once. He let his dad push him back to arm's length after a few minutes and scan him from head to toe, even holding his arms out helpfully to show that he was, in fact, more or less unharmed.

"I'm fine, dad," he said. "Totally fine."

"You weren't in the thick of it?"

Stiles remembered the claustrophobic press of bodies, the unrelenting tide of them as they fought to get out, to get away, to _move_. He forced down a shudder, swallowing hard, and shrugged instead. "I was, sort of," he admitted, more casually than was probably warranted. "But I was up at the front and got out pretty quickly."

His dad gave him one more full-body scan, like maybe he actually had broken bones and bullet wounds that he was just hiding under the flimsy t-shirt and holey sweatpants, and then clapped both hands on his shoulders. They moved up to either side of his neck, warm and calloused and grounding as he scanned his face next, looking for any sign that he was anything less than in perfect health. Stiles had to swallow again; the outpouring of concern was a little overwhelming and for a second he worried he might actually cry.

"Dad, I'm alright," he insisted, though he had to clench his hands into fists at his sides to keep their tremor from giving him away. "A little shaken up, but alright. Better than a lot of people who were out there."

"Okay, kiddo." His dad actually kissed him on the forehead. Stiles could count on one hand the number of times he had done that, and the last time had to have been years ago. "God, I'm glad you're okay."

There was some more hugging then and Stiles wasn't ashamed to admit that he might have clung on a bit; he had been through a traumatic experience, one he was certain would feature in his nightmares for a long time to come, and his dad had always been an oasis of safety and stability for him. He was allowed to cling for a few minutes before throwing himself back into a situation that may or may not be just as dangerous as the one he'd escaped, threat level yet to be determined. Then there was back-slapping and hair-ruffling and pretending the moment wasn't as touchy-feely as it was.

"Well, I've got a meeting to get to," the Sheriff said, reluctance obvious in the way he was still lingering.

"Yeah, what's that about?" Stiles asked, pressing in closer so they could talk quietly enough that the remaining riot squad agents wouldn't overhear. "She said something about a task force?"

"The Powers That Be have decided that the protesters were the ones who started the riot," the Sheriff said, just as quietly. "But Parrish tells a very different story, not that anyone's listening to him. He says one of the riot squad took a baton to a girl in the crowd who reached over the barricade with some kind of pamphlet. A _pamphlet_ , and the guy nearly broke her arm over it like it was a live grenade!"

That would have been the first scream, the one that had started the real panic. Stiles still had a pamphlet of his own stuffed into a pocket somewhere, probably on the floor of Scott's room unless it had made its way to death by washing machine by now. A little tri-folded piece of paper, blue with white lettering and a cartoon werewolf on the front; not exactly threatening. "What happened to de-escalation tactics? Did they not get the memo?"

"Obviously not." The Sheriff sighed, shoulders slumped and defeat in every line of his face.

Stiles didn't like that look at all. His dad was meant to be strong, to fight to the end until truth and justice prevailed, like the superhero kid-Stiles had always thought he was. But this wasn't something he could fight alone, not when the entire system was stacked against them.

"Now Argent is here to determine which of the protesters should be brought up on charges when it's her own agents that deserve to be in cuffs," the Sheriff said, muted anger making a muscle in his jaw jump as he clenched his teeth.

Stiles gritted his own teeth against the infuriated rant that wanted to make its way out of his mouth; his dad had heard it all from him before and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference here and now. His fingers, buried in the pocket of Scott's ratty sweats, curled around the slip of paper where he'd scribbled down Derek's login information. There was a chance, slim though it might be, that he could find something there, something more concrete, something that might give him an edge. He didn't know what he was expecting to find or what he intended to do with it, but anything would be better than this helpless frustration.

"Yeah, well, you'll probably be the one in trouble if you keep her waiting any longer," Stiles said, nodding back toward the little-used conference room. "Though I get the feeling she tends to use her handcuffs for other purposes."

His dad made a face at him. "Filed under: Things I Don't Need To Hear From My Son," he said. He ruffled Stiles hair and gave him a light shove. "Now go on, get out of here. Make the rounds of your friends, check in and make sure they're all accounted for. And text me sometime so I know you're still alive."

Stiles laughed and nodded. "I will, dad, promise."

He waited until his dad had disappeared into the conference room to start sidling toward his office instead. The door was already half-ajar, so he didn't have to worry about that. He just had to time it right so no one saw him go in, taking his opportunity when a riot squad guy told an off-color joke that had his comrades laughing uproariously and the rest of BHPD throwing him disgusted looks. Once inside, he very slowly eased the door most of the way shut behind him, then twisted the knob so it would shut without a click.

Mission accomplished, Stiles threw himself into his dad's ergonomically designed desk chair and booted up the desktop, wiggling the mouse impatiently when it took too long for his tastes. He had some time—if he knew his dad, then the Sheriff would make at least a cursory effort to convince Argent to lay off the innocent college students they already had behind bars, and that conversation would take a while—but he didn't know exactly how much, and it was always better to be speedy about things if he didn't want to get caught with his metaphorical pants down.

He punched in Derek's username and password, letting out a silent cheer when they went through. First he pulled up Deputy Garrison's personnel file and read through his information, looking for anything that might give him a lead on his real identity. It didn't look particularly promising on that front.

Name: MIchael James Garrison

Age: 28 (Different from the age Derek had claimed back in Scott's living room, he noticed.)

Date of birth: May 26th, 1988 (Stiles made note of the day and month just in case they were real, though he doubted it.)

The rest of the information he wasn't sure what to do with. It was likely that Derek had actually gone through the police academy himself, which took impressive dedication to his endgame but was more plausible than Derek somehow forging the documents and references it would take to get him this job. Anything before then, his high school and college transcripts, details of his family and childhood, were almost guaranteed to be invented, though they had to be decent forgeries to get him this far and let him stay here without raising any red flags.

None of it told him anything, really. There was no mention of a Derek in the file, even tangentially, and he didn't know enough about Derek to recognize if anything else might be helpful. Frustrated, he exed out of it and tapped incessantly at the mouse without actually clicking on anything, chewing on the knuckles of his other hand as he thought.

He couldn't get the smell of Kate's perfume out of his head. Something about it struck him as _important_ , as an avenue somehow worth pursuing. Derek had reacted viscerally to that perfume, and to the sight of Gerard on the television. Somehow, the mysterious Derek and the Argent family—Kate Argent in particular—were connected, and _that_ was something he needed to figure out ASAP.

He started with Kate, pulling up what files the database had with her name attached and scanning through them. Nothing immediately incriminating caught his eye. There was no mention of a Derek here either, just a whole lot of ruthlessness and ever so slightly questionable case closures. Kate was the type of agent to work just barely within the law, skirting the edges of it when she thought it would bring down her perp. Stiles couldn't really object to that sort of investigating considering his current activities and their dubious legality, but then there was the fact that every single case she had worked was centered around a were.

Her opinion of werewolves was obvious just from her case files. She pursued them mercilessly when they were in the wrong, and when they were victims? Nothing. Either the case got thrown out, it was pawned off on somebody else, or it somehow got turned around to show that the victimized weres were _actually_ the criminals all along. From what he could tell everything was aboveboard, but something about it all struck Stiles as very wrong and he just wasn't familiar enough with this type of paperwork to know what.

Gerard next then. Stiles didn't know if it was just his surname and his prejudice that had set Derek off or if it was something more personal like with Kate, but Stiles went digging around after him too. A lot of what came up for Gerard Argent was classified and redacted, considering how high up in the government he was, but there was still a significant amount of stuff for Stiles to sort through. The words started to blur together, the same legalese phrases repeated over and over again with different crimes, different names, different—

There! Stiles scrolled back in a hurry to where he had caught sight of the name _Derek_. He clicked through to a document that appeared to be an investigation report on a house fire from several years ago. The file was brief, hardly more than an overview, and when he scrolled down to the bottom Stiles saw that it had been ruled an accident, something about a candle getting knocked over. There was a distressingly long list of names of the family members who had died in the fire, and there was a Derek on the list.

Derek Hale, aged 16, it said. Stiles did the math and found that Derek Hale, were he alive, would be twenty-four years old today. And Laura Hale, a sister of Derek's, had her birthday listed as May 26th, 1988, the same one on Deputy Garrison's fake personnel file.

Stiles clicked around until he found the coroner's report. There weren't really any bodies to speak of, the fire burned too hot for that, but there were little packets of bleached-white bone fragments and each was set alongside a picture of the person they assumed they had belonged to. He scrolled down to Derek and knew he had found what he was looking for. He was softer back then, face rounded and babyish before he had truly grown into his strong jaw and cheekbones, but the eyebrows were just as intimidating and those eyes—no one could ever mistake those eyes.

Derek Hale had died in the Hale house fire back in 2008, and yet Derek Hale was undeniably crashed out on Scott's couch in 2016, very much alive despite recent events trying to make him not so. It didn't make any sense. Why would a sixteen year old escape from an accidental house fire and not come forward for help? Why would he go underground and forge a new identity?

Unless the fire wasn't an accident. Unless he knew coming forward would only put him in more danger.

Stiles went back to the report and found exactly what his gut told him he would: Kate Argent had been a part of the original investigation. It was one of the cases she'd passed off to someone else within a few days and she'd barely been involved in it, which was why there hadn't been hardly anything there in her copy of the file. Stiles frowned at the screen, clicking back to skim through her other case files again.

Every single case had something to do with weres. Whether they were the criminal or the victim, there was always at least one were in every case file she had. Except this one. There was no mention of werewolves anywhere in the file on the Hale house fire, not one. So either Derek had been bitten since he escaped from it, or that information had been left out. Either Derek had become an alpha at some point over the last eight years, or he had inherited the power from someone in his family upon their death.

Stiles felt sick to his stomach as he read Gerard's report more carefully, the account from the first responders, the arson investigator's official statement, what little evidence had been catalogued.

There was only one word for it: sloppy.

Stiles was no detective, but he had grown up expecting to be one eventually and his dad had made sure to instill in him an appreciation for how thorough a police investigation should be. Methodical and meticulous, no stone left unturned and no step left undocumented. But this was nothing like that. There were spaces left blank, promising-looking lines of questioning never followed up on, a chain of evidence that wasn't satisfactorily maintained. It was a mess.

And Gerard! He was the Attorney General for the US government, why the hell was _he_ the one to sign off on this case? An accidental house fire in Northern California, even one that killed fourteen people, should never have crossed his desk to begin with! And yet here he was presiding over it personally, taking it off _his own daughter's_ hands and making sure that no one looked too closely at how atrociously it was handled.

The conclusion Stiles was coming to made his hands shake and sweat break out on the back of his neck, but it was hard to avoid. From what he could find, it looked like the Hale house fire hadn't been accidental at all and the Argents had conspired to cover it up, making sure to leave all mention of werewolves out of the report to further insure that no one connected it back to their own violently anti-werewolf stance.

And with Derek's reaction to Kate's perfume? What were the chances that Derek had had a personal run-in with Kate Argent in the years since the fire that killed his family and left him persona non grata? What opportunity did he have to familiarize himself with her scent when he was supposed to be dead and she would have recognized him from his old picture? Conclusion: he had come into contact with her _before_ the fire, _before_ his supposed death, _before_ she had any logical reason to interact with him enough to invoke that sort of response years later.

Stiles tried to stop himself from speculating too much on that because it had bile rising in the back of his throat, but once he started making connections there was no slowing down.

The way Derek had been so horrified at the thought of Scott, a werewolf, dating an Argent, his insistence that she was going to hurt him, that she was a liar and a specist (and Stiles was almost certain that Derek had been going to say "and a murderer" before he cut himself off). Derek had only been sixteen, but to know Kate's perfume that well? He had to be up close and personal at least once, there was no other explanation that made sense, though Stiles hoped to god that Derek would be able to give him one.

The rattle of the doorknob snapped Stiles out of his single-minded focus, the kind only a puzzle and a research binge could achieve, and he had a brief moment of panic that was somehow better than the horror and nausea of the last however long it had been. Thankfully his dad must have stopped to talk to someone or bark orders or whatever because Stiles had just enough time between the rattle and the actual opening of the door to logout of the computer and kick his feet up onto the table near the mouse so it looked like maybe he had just accidentally kicked it out of its hibernation.

"Stiles?" his dad asked, stopping short and looking more confused than Stiles thought was warranted. Then Stiles glanced at the clock and realized it had been well over an hour since the meeting had started and he had no reason to still be here.

Except: "I thought maybe you could use a food break!" he said with a grin. "I doubt you had time to take a lunch earlier. Or maybe I could pick you up something and bring it back? Can't have you wasting away in here, you know, you've been working far too hard lately."

His dad didn't look convinced—why was no one ever convinced by his lies? Was he that obvious, or had everyone just caught onto the pattern and collectively decided to never take him at his word ever?—and Stiles made a special effort not to so much as glance in the direction of the computer.

"I'm gonna be stuck here all night, son," the Sheriff said, coming around to pat him on the shoulder. "I'm swamped, but if you want to bring me a meatball sub, sans rabbit food caveat, it might make the evening survivable."

Stiles pursed his lips, pondering whether or not a guilt-free meatball sub would be enough of a bribe to convince his dad not to act on his obvious suspicions about Stiles' presence. "Okay, but only because you've earned a reward," he said sternly. "Or maybe it can be a consolation prize for how much this day has sucked."

His dad laughed and ruffled his hair. "Well, if _this_ is all it takes to get meatballs without kale chips…" he said, teasing, and Stiles smacked him in the stomach with the back of his hand.

"Don't expect this to be a regular thing, old man!" he said. "Special circumstances. Desperate times and desperate measures, et cetera."

"Yeah, yeah," his dad said, hauling him up by the scruff of the neck and giving him a push towards the door. "Now out with you! The grownups have work to do."

Stiles left without much more fuss, just a melodramatic eye roll, and hoped his dad would only think to check his own account's activity when he went snooping.

* * *

 **Trigger warnings: references to murder and arson. Specist language, if the correlate to racism makes you uncomfortable in any way.**


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: (See end of chapter for trigger warnings.)**

* * *

Scott was still at work by the time Stiles had gotten his dad a very-late-lunch-slash-early-dinner and made it back to the apartment. Stiles let himself in with the key on top of the doorframe—he kept telling Scott to find a better, less cliched place to stash it, but the guy never listened and, as Derek had said earlier, it wasn't like there was anything worth stealing anyway—and kicked off his shoes just inside. He had already opened his mouth to announce his presence when he caught sight of Derek.

He was fast asleep on the couch, not sprawled out like Stiles would have expected but pressed firmly against the back with his arms tucked in tight to his bare chest. It was obviously a defensive stance, designed to make him feel safer in a strange place, and Stiles closed his mouth without making a sound. He tiptoed closer and, instead of sitting in the squeaky armchair, lowered himself onto the floor in front of it so he could lean back against the foot and have a perfect view of Derek's face.

Derek was a beautiful man. Stiles had acknowledged that about him a long time ago, back when he was just another deputy at the station, albeit one that stood out. Scott had had to listen to him wax poetic about Derek's—Garrison's, then—flawless bone structure and silky hair and washboard abs for months. Even if he had been grumpy and sometimes short-tempered, all heavy scowls and stony looks, there had never been any doubt that he was utterly gorgeous.

The grumpiness made a lot more sense now, in context. Garrison had supposedly had a normal, happy childhood and a pretty solid career in the making, nothing to frown at anywhere to be found, but Derek? If Stiles was anywhere in the ballpark of right with his assumptions, then it was a miracle that Derek Hale could do anything _but_ frown.

But he wasn't frowning now, though there was a stubborn crease between his eyebrows that spoke of unpleasant dreams. His face was slack, his lips parted ever so slightly, and Stiles fought down the urge to stroke his cheek because that was a highly inappropriate impulse that should not be acted upon. He pulled out his phone instead, unwilling to disturb what was probably a very necessary and restorative sleep. He flicked through his apps and finally decided on Subway Surfer, knowing that would keep him occupied as he was determined to wait until Derek woke up naturally.

He ran down most of his phone battery and was up to nearly seven million points by the time Derek stirred, a personal record and also more than twice Scott's highest score, thank you very much. Still, Stiles willingly crashed his little avatar into the back of a subway car in favor of watching Derek push himself upright and stretch his arms over his head with all the grace of a jungle cat and a groan that made Stiles swallow convulsively. The fact that Derek was still shirtless was both a blessing and a curse.

"Good sleep?"

Derek jumped as if he hadn't realized that Stiles was there. Then he checked his watch and the ever-present frown made its return. "I've been here too long," he muttered, and Stiles was beginning to notice a pattern of question evasion with this guy.

"By what standard?" he asked.

Derek ignored him again, reaching for the bandages around his middle. He fumbled around until he found where the ends were tucked in and began unwinding them, wrapping them neatly around his right hand instead and placing the whole pile carefully on the couch next to him when he was finished. The wound had closed up over the last few hours, flesh knitting together until there was nothing left but a faint dimple of a scar, looking weeks old instead of less than a day. With a little more time even that would fade. Derek poked at it, palpating the area and wincing slightly like it was still tender.

"So you're healing's almost back up to par?" Stiles asked. "Senses all in working order? Fit to fight?"

Derek grunted in response, which was neither helpful nor informative, and clambered to his feet. One hand still pressed protectively over his healing wound, he rooted around on the far side of the couch with the other until he found his undershirt. It was crusted with blood and had a hole in the side, but he still eyed it critically as if he might be able to make it work somehow.

Stiles huffed; he had never been fond of being ignored, especially when it was so obviously deliberate. "Yo, dude, are you even gonna acknowledge my existence? You're being very rude."

"What do my manners matter?" Derek asked, tossing aside the undershirt and pulling up the khaki uniform top instead, also bloody and Swiss cheese-y. "I'll be out of your hair soon anyway."

 _Maybe I don't want you to be_ , Stiles thought, but he bit his tongue to keep from saying that out loud. Instead he leaned back, crossing his feet in front of him as he watched Derek with narrowed eyes. The guy was sure in a hurry to leave. He had reason to be, of course, but he had worked so hard to make it to where he was that it seemed a shame to drop everything without any fight at all. Stiles would bet anything that he already had a new destination in mind and that that destination was Washington DC, where Kate spent most of her time.

"Everyone down at the station is real worried about you," Stiles said lightly, totally unconcerned and not at all watching Derek's every move for a reaction.

Derek stiffened, his fingers clenching for a moment around the ruined fabric of his deputy's uniform. He didn't look Stiles' way and he didn't respond, just kept examining his shirts as if they would mend themselves before his eyes. As far as distractions went, they weren't very effective, but he was making a valiant effort by them.

"Whole place seemed a little short staffed," Stiles went on, fiddling with a hole in the side of his borrowed sweats because he felt jittery, too restless to sit completely still. "Not empty, though. No, there were definitely a few faces we don't usually see around these parts."

Derek made a noise this time, half in acknowledgement and half in well-concealed interest. He was folding the shirts now, making sure the creases were smooth and even and then stacking them on the opposite arm of the couch so he could keep avoiding Stiles' eyes. But Stiles wasn't going to let him get away with that forever.

"Yeah," he said. "I ran into one of them while I was there, quite literally. I think maybe you know her. Kate Argent."

Every muscle in Derek's bare and very well-formed back tensed up until it looked like it had to hurt and Stiles knew he was right, knew it with a certainty that usually felt like triumph but now tasted like ash and old blood in his mouth; he hadn't wanted to be right about this, not really, no matter how much he wanted to solve the puzzle.

"Why would I know her?" Derek asked, the words strangled and barely comprehensible from the way his jaw was locked up so tight.

Stiles got to his feet, wanting to be on Derek's level when he said this. "You tell me, Derek Hale. Why did you recognize her perfume after eight years?"

Derek whipped around to face him, eyes wide and shocked and maybe a little bit scared. Stiles wondered how long it had been since anyone had called him by that name, since anyone had known him for who he was. Stiles didn't look away, didn't break eye contact, no matter that the mess of indecipherable emotion on Derek's face made his chest hurt in funny ways.

Derek had started shaking, Stiles could see it even from a distance, his hands clenching and un-clenching spasmodically at his sides. He looked one step away from taking a running leap out the nearest window if Stiles spoke one wrong word, so he stayed silent until the man got himself under some semblance of control.

"How did you…?" Derek asked, but his breath was coming fast and he couldn't get the whole question out.

"How did I find your name?" Stiles guessed, and Derek nodded a bit frantically. "A very roundabout process based mostly on the patented Stilinski Intuition. Don't worry, nobody else is likely to make the same connections I did. Your fake identity was a good one, and don't tell me how you got it; there's only so much incriminating information I need to have."

There were a few seconds when Stiles genuinely worried that Derek might have a panic attack—a very not good thing for werewolves, he knew from experience with Scott, and he could only imagine how much worse it would be with an alpha—but then Derek turned away and buried his face in his hands, taking a few slow, deep breaths until the moment had passed. When he looked back again, he had slipped into place the inscrutable mask Stiles was so familiar with from the last several months, the one that made him so good in the interrogation room and had won him three station-wide under-the-table poker tournaments.

"What do you know?" he asked, voice flat and carefully controlled.

"I know that you're name is Derek Hale," Stiles told him. "I know that your family was killed in a fire in 2008 and that, as far as anyone else knows, you died with them. I know that you went to ground upon escaping the fire, and I know that the investigation was deliberately mishandled by the Argents, both Kate and Gerard. And I know that the smell of Kate's perfume sends you into a frenzy, even on someone else."

Derek didn't react past a subtle tensing of his jaw until that last one, when he abruptly shook his head and looked away.

"That's all I know for sure," Stiles said, "but I think I've connected a few dots from there."

"Really?" Derek asked, harsh like maybe his skepticism alone would be enough to make Stiles stop talking, to shut him up and keep him from looking any closer.

Stiles pushed on anyway, unrelenting. "I think your family was murdered. I think Kate had a hand in it, and that you knew it even then. I think she used you to get to them, and that's why you let them assume you were dead instead of coming forward."

Stiles paused, sharp eyes focused on Derek to see how his not-quite-accusations were affecting him. Every word seemed to hit him like a sledgehammer. He staggered back a step, his hand going to his chest and rubbing there like it could soothe away some ancient ache, a wound that ran much deeper than flesh. He didn't deny any of it though, and Stiles had to take a steadying breath before he could say, "I think your self-assigned mission is to kill Kate Argent and get revenge for your family."

Derek didn't deny that either. Stiles expected him to be angry, either at Kate and what she had done or because his careful plot had been uncovered. He had certainly been angry before, all red eyes and gnashing teeth ready to sink into vulnerable flesh and tear it apart, but none of that was here now. Bare-chested and hunched in on himself like he'd been punched in the sternum, Derek just looked afraid, and strangely small for such a large and fit man.

Still, for all his fear, Derek managed to look Stiles in the eye as he said, "Are you going to try and stop me?" with a force that was all bravado and no true confidence. Seeing the way he swayed on his feet, forward and back again like he couldn't decided if he wanted to rush forward or run away, Stiles had to wonder if maybe Derek wanted him to.

"I don't think you're a killer, Derek," he said, voice hoarse and low. "And I don't think revenge is ever the right choice. But—" He held up a hand when Derek's face twisted into a snarl of indignation, expression all but screaming _you don't know me_. "—that doesn't mean I won't help."

Derek stopped short, obviously taken aback. He shifted on his feet, flexing his hands like he didn't know what to do with them. "You'll...help?"

"There's still something we can do, Derek." Stiles stepped forward, trying to keep his body language as open and honest as he could, as if he could subliminally influence Derek into trusting him when he obviously hadn't trusted anyone in years. He wanted to help Derek, honestly he did, but not like that. "Something that doesn't involve premeditated murder. We can get justice."

Derek mouth pulled up into a sneer, all hints of vulnerability swept away by bitterness in an instant. "Justice?" he asked, barking a laugh that was all sharp edges. "There's no such thing. I learned that a long time ago."

"We can expose them," Stiles talked over him because Derek was already shaking his head, backing away, already writing him off as an ally and closing up again; he couldn't lose Derek now, not when he had just started to get somewhere. "We can tell the world what they did and make them pay for it."

"And how do you plan to do that, Stiles?" Derek demanded, holding his hands out to the side. "It's not like we can put the match in Kate's hand."

"There are other ways to nail them," Stiles said. "The investigation into the fire was botched like nobody's business, you should see the—"

"You think I haven't seen the file?" Derek asked, incredulous. "I have it memorized. I know just how much of a piss-poor effort they put into it."

"Then you know we have the start of a paper trail!"

"It's all circumstantial," Derek argued.

"Maybe, but in conjunction with a firsthand account—"

"Hearsay from a criminal and fugitive," Derek said with a self-effacing gesture to himself. "In case you haven't noticed, Stiles, I'm not exactly a credible witness. There's no physical evidence linking the Argents to the fire, and everything you ' _know_ ' is speculation at best."

"But the speculation is _right_ ," Stiles said through gritted teeth, frustration bringing a flush to his face as he fought back the urge to punch the entire American justice system in its collective face. "And you can corroborate it."

"None of it would hold up in court, especially not against the Argents and a jury of _their_ peers. They're powerful and influential and well-connected; I'm nothing next to that."

"No," Stiles shot back, latching on to the one thing Derek had that the Argents didn't. "You're a sympathetic victim."

Derek didn't like that, being referred to as a victim. He growled, eyes flashing, but Stiles didn't let that deter him, couldn't when there was this much on the line, this much potential to blow things out of the water, not just for Derek but for everyone of his kind.

"They may have political connections, but Derek, you could have the might of the people behind you. The entire _movement_ would rally around you if they knew. And more than just weres! There were humans in your family, Derek!" he said, as if he didn't know that, and Derek bit back a noise that sounded almost like a whimper. "Human children, even," Stiles pressed, "killed for the sake of one woman's anti-were sentiment. There's not a person in the country who would condone that, on either side of the were rights fence! Put this out there and the pressure from the public will—"

"You want to use my family's murder as a rallying cry?" Derek asked. "To drag it all out in the open and wave it around like some kind of banner?"

He sounded like he wanted to be angry, disbelieving, but it came out more pained, like the words were being dragged out of him against his will. Stiles nearly bit his cheek until it bled; when he put it that way, it sounded awful. But it was also likely to be the only way that the Hales would be avenged properly, not to mention the only chance Derek himself had for staying out of prison when all was said and done.

"I want to show the Argents for what they are," Stiles said instead, "so they can be brought to justice for their crimes."

But Derek didn't seem to be listening anymore. He had his hands twisted into his hair now, shaking his head like that denial was the only thing keeping him afloat in a storm.

"No," he said. "No, no, no, you can't. You can't do that, I can't—"

Those thoughts of a panic attack resurfaced and Stiles reached out a hand in alarm, but Derek recoiled and he pulled it back. "Derek—"

"It'd be a fucking circus!" Derek shouted, on the knife's edge between fury and panic. "Another meaningless media frenzy! A giant spectacle for people to talk about at the dinner table like my little sister burning to death was some political statement!"

Stiles paled, bile rising in his throat; he'd tried not to look too closely at the list of victims, at exactly how many people Derek had lost to the flames, because he'd known how much harder this would be if he didn't stay objective. But it wasn't objective for Derek, it couldn't be. It would only ever be unbearably personal for him, maybe _too_ personal. God, Stiles should've known better than to poke a sharp stick into a buried trauma like this, he was _so fucking stupid_.

"And—" Derek continued, throwing a hand out at Stiles imploringly like that alone would be enough to convince him not to go through with this. "And it wouldn't work anyway, it wouldn't do any good! All it would do is put me in a spotlight and give Kate an excuse to point the finger at me. That's what she _does_ , Stiles, it's what she always does. She'll twist it around to make it my fault, _everyone_ would, and I can't—"

"Okay!" Stiles said quickly. "Okay, Derek, I won't do it. I won't, do you hear? I'm sorry!"

He repeated that a few more times because what else could he possibly say? He had pushed too hard, dug into things that were not his business and pushed _way_ too hard, and now Derek looked like he might have a legitimate emotional breakdown because of him. He held up his hands, hoping that was a sufficiently non-threatening gesture. Derek had his back pressed against the wall by the window now, as far away from Stiles as he could get in the shoebox of an apartment, and Stiles decided it was probably best not to crowd him at the moment so he stayed where he was.

A glance at the wall clock told him that it was almost eight o'clock and Scott would probably be getting home from his shift before too long. He blew out a breath and ran fingers through his hair, considering their options.

"Okay, look," he said, trying to keep his tone some kind of soothing, "it's getting late. There's no time for anything tonight, no matter what you want to do. It's too late to plan an effective assassination and we're all too exhausted to drive long distances. How about we just sleep on it and decide on a course of action in the morning?"

It took Derek a long time to respond to the question. He still had his hands on his head, dark hair gripped painfully tight in white-knuckled fingers, and his eyes were wide and unfocused and fixed on the floor. But eventually his grip loosened and then fell away, arms dropping heavily to his sides, and he swiped the back of one hand under his nose with a sniffle that made Stiles feel guiltier than anything else had so far. He didn't look up, but he nodded.

"Good," Stiles said. "Good, alright. You can stay here or—"

"No!" Derek said immediately, and Stiles thought there was a tinge of desperation to it. "No, this isn't—it's not secure here. Too many people have access."

Stiles frowned at him for a minute, confused by the vehemence of his answer, but then he noticed the way Derek's nostrils flared and his hands clenched. It wasn't Scott or him or even Scott's mom that Derek was worried about, it was _Allison_. An Argent woman who had a key to the apartment and could let herself in any time. Stiles was sure that, to a sensitive werewolf nose, there were still traces of Allison's—Kate's—perfume lingering in the air. Derek would never feel completely safe here.

"Okay," Stiles said, looking for other options. He couldn't drag anyone else into this. It was bad enough that he'd ruined Scott's couch and made him complicit in this mess, he couldn't do the same to Erica or Lydia or Isaac or Boyd. Besides, he didn't think Derek was up for meeting new people right now, placing his life and his freedom in the hands of strangers he didn't know or trust.

"We can go back to my house," Stiles said finally. "We have a guest room."

Derek looked at him then, eyes red-rimmed and wide, and that look said he thought Stiles was completely out of his mind. "You want me to hide out in the Sheriff's own house?" he asked.

Stiles shrugged. "The one place he'd never think to look!" he said. "And my dad said he'd be working all night anyway. Even if he comes home sometime before dawn, if you're quiet in the guest room then he'll never even know you're there."

Derek's jaw worked like he was chewing on his tongue, nervous and unconvinced.

"Derek," Stiles said, and Derek met his eye. "Back in the alley, when this all started, you asked me if I thought like him. That was your measure for if I could be trusted with your secrets. So, on some level, you trust my dad. You trust him to be on your side if this gets back to him."

Derek looked away, but there was a slump to his shoulders that made Stiles think he had won. With the way his dad had talked about Deputy Garrison, Stiles wasn't surprised; there had been genuine fondness there, an honest appreciation of him not just as an officer but as a person, and that sort of affection was rarely one-sided. Parrish may have been his dad's chosen successor, but he'd taken Garrison under his wing in a different kind of way, paternal and protective, like he could sense the loneliness Derek had been trying so hard to cover up.

After several long minutes of consideration during which Stiles strove to be as quiet and still as he possibly could—an impressive undertaking considering, you know, _him_ —Derek gave an almost imperceptible nod of acceptance.

With a wordless nod of his own, Stiles slipped into Scott's room to grab a t-shirt and clean sweats for Derek to use for the night. Derek took them from him and changed right where he was, not seeming to care if Stiles was there or that he spun around to avert his gaze. Stiles gathered up the ruined deputy's uniform and his own bloodied clothes and stuffed them into a duffle bag Scott had never actually used, wondering if he should burn them or something, and threw it over his shoulder. When he led the way down to the parking lot, Derek followed close behind him.

* * *

The first order of business in Casa de Stilinski was a long hot shower for Derek; after all the shit he'd been through, he needed one. He accepted the towel Stiles offered him with a small smile that Stiles took for gratitude and also maybe a little bit of forgiveness for the earlier debacle, at least he hoped so. Stiles smiled back and promised to have some food ready by the time he got out, since he hadn't eaten any of Allison's chinese.

He set about making mac'n'cheese: the ultimate comfort food, in his opinion, and what his mom had made him every time he was sad or upset. Even just the process of making it lowered Stiles' blood pressure and as he put the noodles on to boil, he took what felt like his first full breath since he had stepped into the square that morning. He hoped it might have a similar effect on Derek.

For a brief moment, Stiles entertained the self-indulgent fantasy of making dinner for Derek in a different context, laying out the good china with an unnecessary flourish, putting candles on the table, picking flowers off the side of the road and pretending he had paid for them. He imagined Derek smiling at him, cheeks pink instead of pallid as he complimented the meal, laughing at one of Stiles' stupid jokes, maybe leaning across the table to—

Stiles cut the fantasy short with a herculean effort. He had no right, especially not now. Dating was so, _so_ far from a priority right now that it didn't even make the list, and Derek was in a remarkably vulnerable place. If Stiles took advantage of his precarious position and the trust Derek was putting in him, he would be the worst kind of jerk. No, there would be absolutely no romancing of Derek Hale at the current time, no matter how much he might want to.

Stiles was so caught up in his preventative self-recriminations that he didn't hear Derek come into the kitchen, didn't notice his presence until a warm body leaned into his space and Derek's voice in his ear said, "Smells good."

Stiles wouldn't normally call himself an easily startled person, but he was definitely startled this time. He jumped a foot in the air and nearly sent noodles and boiling water flying all over the place . Thankfully Derek's werewolf reflexes had rebooted and he was able to take hold of his wrist to steady him before either of them got scalded.

"Careful," he said, though he sounded more amused than scolding.

Stiles meant to apologize, he really did, but upon turning around he found that not only was Derek quite close to him, but he was also shirtless. Shirtless and glistening wet from the shower with water droplets chasing each other from his hairline down his neck. He had his t-shirt in his other hand, the one not still warm and heavy on Stiles' wrist, like he'd been about to put it on but had been distracted by Stiles' cooking.

Stiles almost swallowed his tongue. The scent of his sudden arousal must have been painfully, humiliatingly obvious to Derek's sensitive nose because he let go of him and backed away, clearing his throat and rubbing at the back of his neck.

"Sorry," he said.

"No, it's fine," Stiles croaked, hoping to god that it didn't sound like _no, please rub yourself all over me, I beg you_ instead. "Uh, food's almost done. Beer, coke, tea?"

"Water's fine."

Derek pulled his shirt on and Stiles had very mixed feelings about that. Honestly, it was probably for the best, and Stiles busied himself with setting out plates and pouring them both drinks, anything to distract himself from the star of most of his wet dreams sitting innocuously at his dinner table in sweats and bare feet.

"So, uh, you're feeling alright?" Stiles asked as he dished up the pasta. "All healed up, serum metabolized, the works?"

"Seems like."

He didn't elaborate, and Stiles didn't know him well enough to be sure if he was tired or uncomfortable or just naturally reticent. He was certainly hungry, though, and happily accepted the second helping when Stiles offered it. He did compliment the meal, and Stiles ducked his head to hide the persistent blush that earned him.

They finished the meal in silence, just the clicking of forks against plates and the clinking of ice in their drinks. Then Derek helped him with the dishes, washing as he dried. It was all unbearably domestic and disorientingly normal after the day they had had. Stiles could hardly believe that just that morning Derek had been bleeding out over his hands as hordes of people stampeded past them to avoid rampant gunfire. It felt like a bad dream, but there was no other way to explain Derek standing in his kitchen, close enough to bump shoulders, so he was forced to acknowledge the reality of it all.

The awkwardness intensified when they finished the dishes and were left with nothing to occupy their hands. It was barely 9:30pm, hardly a respectable time to go to bed, and despite the exhaustion gnawing at Stiles' bones, he felt wired, wide awake in a strangely detached way that left him excruciatingly aware of Derek at his side. The werewolf seemed to be facing the same dilemma, fidgeting like Stiles' had never seen him do before and possibly avoiding Stiles' eye, though that might have been Stiles' insecurities rearing their ugly heads.

"Movie?" Stiles suggested for want of anything else to do.

Derek gave him a funny look but nodded readily enough.

Stiles put in one of the Marvel movies without stopping to check which one, and then had a fierce internal debate over whether to join Derek on the couch or to take the arm chair on the far side of it. He decided that the arm chair would make it seem like he was avoiding Derek, like he didn't want to be too close to him now that he knew about Derek's colorful past, and he didn't want to give him that impression at all. So he plopped down on the couch, very conscious of the foot of space between his thigh and Derek's, and pushed play.

The movie passed mostly in almost-companionable silence. Stiles got the feeling that neither of them were really paying all that much attention to it, but it was a relief to let himself zone out and not think for an hour or two, to give himself a break from all the mental and emotional turmoil. It felt like he hadn't stopped thinking since that morning, from the riot to the daring rescue and escape to the revelations at the station and the overly dramatic confrontation. He'd been in hyperdrive for hours, and now that he'd run out of things to overanalyze, his brain had turned into mush.

By the time the credits rolled, Stiles felt drowsy and loose-limbed and a little like he might just pass out where he was and sleep for a year or two. When he mustered up the energy to peel his eyes open and glance at Derek, he found him in a similar state, half-asleep against the back of the couch. The light from the kitchen filtered through into the dim living room from behind him, casting his face mostly in shadow and limning his profile in gold.

"I'm sorry," Stiles murmured before he could think better of it.

Derek made a questioning noise.

"About earlier," Stiles clarified. "I was nosy and pushy and insensitive, and you have every right to tell me to shove it."

"You don't have to shove it," Derek said, and it sounded like an apology of its own. "You were just trying to help, in your own pushy kind of way."

Stiles snorted. "Still," he said, head rolling back and eyes slipping closed of their own accord. "You have a right to privacy, and a right to dictate your own life. You don't owe me anything and I shouldn't have acted like you did."

"I think I owe you a lot," Derek said, so quiet that Stiles had to look at him to make sure he'd actually said it. He was looking back, eyes sleepy and half-lidded but not lacking their unusual intensity. "My life, for one."

"I don't know about that," Stiles said, feeling his cheeks heat up. "I mean, there's no guarantee you couldn't have gotten out of there on your own. You're smart and resourceful and physically fit and stuff, so you'd probably have been just fine without—"

"Would you just shut up and let me thank you?"

It was such a familiar tone, the kind of exasperation that he heard from Scott and his dad and Lydia on a daily basis, that Stiles had to laugh, burying his face in the couch's upholstery to muffle it. Apparently his giggles were contagious, though, because before long, Derek was laughing too, both of them caught up in the ridiculousness of the moment in its context. It was a good laugh, the kind that made his stomach hurt and left him the tiniest bit high from oxygen deprivation, all sorts of pent up tension flooding out of him with every hitched breath.

When he'd gotten himself under control again, Stiles found that they had gravitated closer together, shoulders pressed close and warm against each other, but neither of them seemed inclined toward moving. Whether that was down to weariness or an appreciation of the closeness, he didn't know and refused to let himself contemplate. But then he looked up and Derek's face was inches from his, generous mouth tugged up in a smile and little crinkles around his eyes.

Stiles didn't meant to say it, had definitely not intended to let the words come out of his mouth, but since when had that ever stopped him before?

"God, I had such a crush on you."

He nearly smacked himself; he had _just_ been berating himself earlier for even entertaining thoughts like that and now he was blurting them out like a lovestruck moron. He'd like to say that he was better than that, but he was self-aware enough by now to acknowledge that, no, this was pretty par for the course with him. Lydia could attest to it.

Derek didn't look disgusted, though, didn't shove him off the couch or laugh in his face or anything. Instead, Stiles thought he saw the barest hint of a blush as Derek's eyes flitted downward to where his hands were spread over his thighs, long fingers flexing against solid muscle and soft fabric.

"Had?"

Stiles was fairly sure his brain had shorted out. Of all the reactions he could have anticipated in this moment, Derek smiling and looking up at him through a fan of dark and unfairly long eyelashes was not one of them.

"Uh, well," Stiles stammered, floundering between his desire to be responsible and fair to Derek in this moment and his desire to prostrate himself before Derek and beg for his attention. "I mean, I was crushing hard on Deputy Garrison, you know, for months. The whole station knew, I think, except maybe you. It was a little bit pathetic, actually."

"You're not pathetic," Derek protested, earnest enough that Stiles had to believe he meant it. "I always thought you were—"

He cut himself off with a little noise that might have been embarrassment, but there was no way Stiles could let that stand. He jostled Derek's shoulder, feeling bold with the dark and the lateness of the hour, that sort of candid rush that came with late night confessions, and said, "Thought I was what? C'mon, tell me! I told you about my pathetic crush, now it's your turn."

He thought he saw Derek roll his eyes but it was hard to tell in the dimness. "Just that you were pretty great," he said, looking determinedly at the ceiling now instead of at Stiles. "I mean, top of your class at Berkeley with a double major? That's crazy. And you're so passionate in your activism, so determined to make a difference. You should hear the way your dad brags about you when you're not there to see."

"Really?" Stiles asked, skeptical. Not that he didn't think his dad was proud of him or anything, just that he always caused so much trouble for him. Stiles was sure that he was responsible for every grey hair on his dad's head and every new wrinkle on his face. Twenty years of pranks and borderline-misdemeanors wasn't much to brag about at the watercooler.

"I'm pretty sure he'd pull out the baby pictures if he didn't think you'd skin him alive for it."

"Damn right I would!" Stiles exclaimed, horrified by the very prospect. "He'd wake up with his furniture bolted to the ceiling and all his favorite vinyls melted down into a scale model of his head which I could then use for target practice until he—"

Derek laughed with his head thrown back, the shoulder still pressed against Stiles' shaking until he shook with it, and the sound sent a pang of warmth through him. "And you're funny too," he said, a helpless-looking smile on his face. "Smart and funny and kind enough to take me in and keep me safe when you didn't have to. Brave enough to dive through a hail of bullets to get me to safety, like a damn hero."

Stiles swallowed hard, stunned into silence for a breathless moment; no one had ever called him a hero before, even jokingly. "I don't think that's exactly how it happened," he said, heart kicking in his chest until he thought it might pop out like in a cartoon. Derek was so _close_ , and had he really been that close a minute ago or was he leaning in, gaze fixed somewhere lower than Stiles' eyes that he knew could only be his mouth, as impossible as that should have been.

"I say it is," Derek whispered, and Stiles could feel the ghost of the words against his lips, warm and the slightest bit ticklish in the best possible way, and there was no denying it now. There was nothing for him to do but close his eyes, tilt his head, wait for the glorious moment when—

The creak and slam of the front door was the worst sound Stiles had ever heard. Okay, maybe it wasn't quite as bad as the crack of gunshots and Derek's hoarse scream as Scott dug into his flesh after the bullet, but the door in that moment was a close third on his list of terrible sounds.

Stiles flailed so hard that he actually knocked himself clean off the couch, crashing into the coffee table on his way to the floor, and it was a miracle that he didn't hit Derek in the face. Or maybe it was because Derek was already halfway across the room, metaphorical hackles raised—though thankfully not literal ones, only the red eyes—as he scanned for an escape route. He hesitated too long.

Before Derek could make a break for it, before Stiles could lever himself off the floor and point him toward the unlocked back door in the kitchen or even upstairs to the window in Stiles' room with the sturdy tree branch leading up to it, the Sheriff was there. He looked worn out and a little disheveled but not the slightest bit surprised. He didn't show any sign of alarm at the growling alpha werewolf in his living room, no shock at seeing his colleague looking significantly less human than was previously supposed, none of that.

Instead he held up his hands and said, "Stand down, deputy."

Stiles scrambled to his feet, throwing himself between a still-growling Derek and his dad, not entirely sure which one he was hoping to protect. "This isn't what it looks like!"

His dad had the audacity to roll his eyes. "Son, I'm pretty sure it's exactly what it looks like."

"Dad, it's more complicated than you think," Stiles said. "If you give us a chance to explain—"

"You don't need to explain anything." The Sheriff looked over his shoulder, grim-faced. "I know who you are, Derek," he said. "And I'm not here to arrest you. I'm here to help."

* * *

 **Trigger warnings: No significant triggers. Derek is in danger of a panic attack at one point but it doesn't happen, and there's only talk of the traumas previously mentioned.**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: (See end of chapter for trigger warnings.)**

* * *

The Sheriff refused to explain anything until they were all sitting around the living room with mugs of freshly brewed coffee in hand, despite the late hour. Derek was back on the couch looking a little lost and confused and a _lot_ like he had given up on keeping any of his secrets _secret_ , at least from the Stilinski men. Stiles sat next to him, leg bouncing and fingers fiddling until Derek reached out to slap his hands down in annoyance. Stiles made a face at him, which he returned.

The Sheriff sank into the arm chair with a groan that made him sound very much like the old man he always insisted he wasn't. Then he spent a long minute just _looking_ at the two of them, all narrowed eyes and calculation and judgment, as they fought not to fidget. It was his interrogation expression, the one he used on suspected criminals and also on sons he knew were lying to try and escape punishment for something or other. Stiles was well acquainted with that expression and he always— _always_ —cracked under it eventually.

"C'mon, Pops, you can't leave me hanging here!" Stiles broke out when the strain was too much. "D'you know how much effort it took me to dig up all this shit and put the pieces together? You can't just waltz in here, announce oh-so-casually that you already know, and then not explain how. That's not fair!"

His dad raised an eyebrow at him. "Stiles, where do you think you _got_ that 'Patented Stilinski Intuition' you go on about all the time?" The Sheriff pointed a finger at himself. "From me, kiddo."

Stiles slumped back into the cushions with a groan of irritation. He saw out of the corner of his eye that Derek was smirking and looking thoroughly amused. Stiles kicked him. It was childish, maybe, it was the middle of the night and he had just had his thunder stolen by his dad of all people, so he thought he could be forgiven a little pettiness. Besides, Derek only snorted and kicked him back anyway.

"So did you, like, already know everything? Have you known the whole time?" Stiles asked, ignoring the Look his dad gave them both—a look that had Derek sitting up straighter and scooting away from him like a scolded schoolboy, he noticed—and focusing on the important things.

"Of course not," the Sheriff said. "You think I would have turned a blind eye for months if I had known?"

"Dude, I don't know!" Stiles huffed. "I didn't think you would condone working outside the law at all, but here you are, not turning Derek in!"

"Why are you here?"

Derek's voice was soft, uncertain, like he wasn't sure if it was a good idea to draw attention to himself. Like he thought the Sheriff would change his mind and slap cuffs on him at any moment. He couldn't seem to make himself meet the Sheriff's eye straight on, focusing on his own hands in his lap, and Stiles didn't think he would be wrong to say that Derek looked ashamed.

"Like I said, son," the Sheriff said, and he must have seen the same thing because his tone was unusually gentle. "I'm here to help."

Apparently that wasn't enough for Derek because he bit his lip, his forehead scrunching up in something like frustration. "But why?"

The Sheriff put his mug down on the coffee table, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees so that he could make sure that Derek looked him in the eye.

"I joined the force because I wanted to ensure that justice was done by those who needed it," he said, slow and deliberate. "We are meant to protect and serve, and I take that motto very seriously. Now, usually that involves following the letter of the law and making sure that it's enforced, but occasionally I come across a gross miscarriage of justice at the hands of those who supposedly share that motto. And that's when I start to have a problem."

"And we Stilinskis are nothing if not problem solvers," Stiles threw in, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

His dad smiled back. "I've worked with you a good while now, Derek," he said, sitting back in his chair again. "And I like to think that I'm a pretty decent judge of character. Whether your name is Derek or Michael or Pablo or Spock, none of that changes that you're a good person. And you deserve to have justice done by you and your family. The system failed you the last time, but I won't let that happen again. That's a promise."

Derek ducked his head, but not before Stiles saw how bright his eyes were, glassy with unshed tears. Stiles shifted closer to him, bumping their shoulders together, and instead of jostling him back, Derek leaned against him. When he lifted his head again, the tears were gone—though his eyes were still red in an entirely non-alpha way—and he managed a small smile for them that made him look younger, like maybe he actually was just twenty-four.

"So, uh." Derek cleared his throat. "How exactly did you figure it out? Stiles didn't really tell me how he managed it either."

"I find out that my nosy son has been in my office unsupervised for an hour and a half?" the Sheriff said with a shrug and a smirk. "I know something's up. So I go digging."

"I wasn't in your account!" Stiles protested.

"No, but I check the activity log anyway and find that my missing deputy has somehow logged in. Deputy Garrison wasn't in the station at the time, but you were. It doesn't take a genius to put those pieces together."

Stiles humphed, crossing his arms over his chest and maybe pouting a little bit. It was justified pouting, he thought, considering how well that plan would have worked on someone other than his father who knew too much of his crafty ways.

"And you," the Sheriff said, pointing a finger at Stiles and then dragging it over to Derek, "having his login? That implied a few things."

"So you knew I had Derek with me," Stiles said. "And you logged in to his account like I did and found all the files I didn't have a chance to close out of."

"I followed your breadcrumbs," his dad confirmed. "And I must say, Stiles: that was some damn good sleuthing you did there. There was no obvious connection on the surface, but you followed your gut and managed to dig deep enough to find one anyway."

Stiles' crossed arms loosened, his chest puffing out a little with pride. "I already had my suspicions on that front," he admitted. He told his dad about the way Derek had reacted to Gerard on television, to Allison's perfume, and then smelling the same perfume on Kate. The Sheriff nodded all the way through while Derek stayed silent, watching them both with an expression that Stiles couldn't parse.

"I might could make a detective out of you yet," his dad said.

Stiles couldn't help his smile, but it died pretty quickly when the press of Derek's shoulder against his reminded him that the puzzle he had solved wasn't theoretical this time, wasn't just a training exercise or a way to test himself. It was real and it had real world implications, namely for the man sitting beside him. It was his life they were passing back and forth between them, his tragedy and his loss.

"But what's there to do about it?" Stiles asked. "There's no evidentiary link, no solid proof that Kate Argent was involved."

"Ah, now that's where you're wrong."

Derek's head shot up fast enough to startle Stiles. " _What_?"

"Yeah, what he said!" Stiles said, a little bit offended; there was no _way_ that he had missed something like that. If evidence had been found and catalogued, then he would've seen it somewhere in those reports, he couldn't have just glossed over that.

"Believe it or not," the Sheriff told them, and he looked so pleased with himself that he had information they didn't, Stiles almost wanted to hit him just to make him talk faster. "Kate and Gerard weren't the only ones who worked on the Hale house fire." He reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, rummaging around, calm as can be, as if he hadn't just dropped a bombshell that could change everything.

"I wasn't on the case long," he said. "Just a few days. I was a deputy back then and I didn't choose my own assignments, so when they told me they wanted me to be lead on a different case, something higher profile and much more promising than what they had deemed an open-and-shut accidental fire, I had little choice but to accept. Looking back, I have to wonder if they wanted me gone because I was a little too good at my job."

The Sheriff pulled out a piece of computer paper, wrinkled and folded unevenly, and smoothed it out on his knee.

"I never got a chance to look at most of the evidence collected from the scene back then," he said with a frown. "I was stuck taking witness statements from neighbors who hadn't seen a damn thing, and then I was reassigned. But now, I have full access to the evidence locker and am well within my rights to dig up anything I want. And what I found was this."

He held up the paper and Stiles nearly brained himself on Derek's very solid shoulder as they both tried to get a closer look at it at the same time. It was a photo of four arrows set alongside a measuring stick, long and soot-blackened and with sharp heads that glinted in the camera's flash.

"Why the hell would there be arrows at an arson site?" Stiles asked, honestly baffled.

"Kate is an archer," Derek said hoarsely.

A chill went down Stiles' spine, not only at the words but at the haunted look on Derek's face as he stared at the picture. Stiles turned back to it as well, leaning in closer. The position meant that the front of his right shoulder was flush against the back of Derek's left, but even that wasn't enough to distract him from what he thought he was seeing.

"Wait, is that…?"

His dad was already nodding, reaching around the point at one of the arrows' shafts, just below the head. "This here is fabric. It never got chemically tested so I can't say with any certainty, but it was obviously soaked in something and I'd bet my badge it was something flammable."

"That crazy bitch used flaming arrows to light the house on fire from a distance," Stiles breathed out, disbelieving. "Is that stuff still viable for testing? Would there still be residue?"

"Possibly. And if we were to compare these arrows to ones in Kate's possession now, I think they'd be the same brand and the same length; from what I know, archers are fairly consistent with this sort of thing."

"Allison could tell us that," Stiles said immediately. "She always spends time with her aunt whenever she's in town. Allison is an archer too, and I bet Kate is the one who taught her. If anyone would be able to tell us about Kate's shooting habits, it would be her."

Stiles looked to Derek, expecting him to protest at the thought of them involving Allison, but Derek hadn't taken his eyes off the grainy evidence photo. His lips were pressed tight together, thin and bloodless, and he didn't really seem to be _seeing_ anything anymore.

"Derek?" he asked quietly. "You okay?"

"I never knew how it started," he said, distant. "The fire, I mean. I knew it was her, but I never knew how. I was sleeping, we were all...and then it was just everywhere. It came from all directions, it seemed, and we couldn't…"

Stiles put a hand on Derek's shoulder, tugging gently, trying to break Derek's line of sight. "Hey, come back to me," he said. "Come on, Derek, look at me."

The blankness in Derek's eyes when he finally turned toward him made Stiles' stomach turn over, like he wasn't even in his body anymore but somewhere else, back in that house, stuck in the flames with his dying family. Just when Stiles was starting to consider slapping Derek—anything to bring him out of this disturbing detachment—Derek screwed his eyes shut and turned away to bury his face in his hands. His hands were trembling when he pulled them away to press the back of one against his mouth instead like he might be sick.

With a shaky exhale and an abrupt shake of his head, Derek pushed Stiles away and disappeared into the kitchen. Stiles was halfway to his feet before he could think of why he wanted so badly to follow him, to offer whatever meager comfort he could, but his dad took hold of his arm to hold him back. Reluctantly, Stiles sunk back into his seat, but he didn't manage to draw his eyes away from the doorway until he heard the sound of water running in the sink.

"Just give him a minute, kid," his dad said just above a whisper. "This has got to be a lot for him."

Understatement of the year. Stiles ran a hand through his hair, pulling a little. The sting of it was good, helped him focus. He turned back to the picture; such an innocuous thing to hold such a sinister meaning, he thought.

"Is this all you found?" he asked. "Obviously it wasn't logged properly. Was there anything else they buried?"

The Sheriff nodded. "There was a sample of an unidentified substance in evidence, but no notes on the context of where it was collected. A kind of black powdery stuff, not gunpowder but something else."

Stiles sighed, rubbing at his forehead; maybe just because it was almost one in the morning after an already exhausting day, but he couldn't for the life of him put together a list of substances that might be. He'd have to go searching in the morning, or maybe they could show it to Derek and see if he had any idea what it might be. He filed it away for a future brainstorm session.

"So would the arrows be enough to connect her to the crime?" he asked, not needing to specify who he meant. "I mean, without fingerprints or DNA or any way to definitively _prove_ that they belonged to her? As far as I know, bows have serial numbers but individual arrows don't."

"No," the Sheriff admitted. "But it could definitively prove that the fire was set intentionally and thus get the case reopened as arson."

"And thirteen counts of premeditated murder," Stiles added under his breath. Couldn't forget that.

"It's not exactly what I would call an ironclad case," the Sheriff said with a sigh of his own, "but with what we have here, I might be able to get us a shot at that."

Stiles frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

"Considering his history, Derek's testimony will only count for so much on its own. But in conjunction with these arrows, it might be enough to get us an authorized wire."

It took a long, confused minute for the meaning of that statement to filter through Stiles' over-tired brain. A wire, as in a recording device for someone to wear and collect damning evidence against another person. Which meant talking to the suspect, getting them to incriminate themselves. Which meant—

"You think Kate will confess?"

"I think she's arrogant enough to brag about it," the Sheriff said with a grim twist to his mouth. "I think if she's confronted with Derek, she won't be able to resist holding it over his head."

Judging by even the small encounter that Stiles had had with her at the station, there wasn't a single doubt in his mind that that was true. She had practically _oozed_ narcissism and self-importance, like the kind of cat that spent hours watching her mouse run circles around itself in a panic before she got bored enough to put it out of its misery. Present her with someone she'd already hurt and give her the opportunity to rub salt in the wounds? That was probably her catnip.

The only problem was that made Derek the panicked mouse, the wounded one rolled downhill into a veritable salt mine.

"You want Derek to confront her directly?"

Stiles tried to say it quietly enough that Derek wouldn't hear, or else hoped that Derek would be too caught up in his emotions to keep track of their conversation, but he had no such luck. There was a tinkle of breaking glass and then Derek was in the kitchen doorway, white-faced and wide-eyed.

Stiles' heart sank into his stomach. "Derek—"

"You want me to _what_?" It almost sounded angry, but he was clutching at the door frame like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

"Son, I know this is scary," the Sheriff said, low and aiming for soothing, as he stood up to face him. "But it's the best way to make the charges stick. To go through with this, we need to—"

"I never said I wanted to go through with this!" Derek snapped. "I had my own plan!"

"Which I can't let you follow through on," the Sheriff said with raised eyebrows, stern and uncompromising; he was already bending the rules as much as he was comfortable with, Stiles knew, and there was no way he would condone straight up murder.

Stiles might, if push really came to shove and he honestly believed they deserved it, but not if there was any other way. And there _was_ another way here. It wasn't ideal and it certainly wouldn't be pleasant, but it could really _work_ if they could just get Derek through it without him having an emotional breakdown.

"You would've had to see her with your plan too, Derek," he pointed out, though he stayed sitting down; he didn't want to crowd Derek, making him feel like they were ganging up on him. "You were going to confront her anyway."

"To rip her throat out with my teeth," Derek snarled, "not have a fucking chat."

"This chat will put her behind bars," the Sheriff said.

"No," Derek said without a second of hesitation. "No, she'll talk her way out of it. She always does, always puts the blame on someone else, and she _always_ gets away with it."

"She can't talk her way around this, Derek." The Sheriff was inching closer, slowly enough not to spook Derek and send him running, still calm and firm in the face of Derek's distress. "She'll call you by name. She'll want to know how you survived. If she knows that you've broken laws yourself, then she'll feel comfortable that you won't go to the authorities for fear of retribution, and that means that she won't censor herself. She _will_ talk, and she _will_ say something to incriminate herself."

Derek was practically vibrating with tension, fingers flexing on the door frame hard enough that Stiles worried he might crack the wood, but he didn't run. It looked like he might be chewing on his tongue or maybe grinding his teeth, and Stiles had an intrusive thought of whether that was the sort of damage that werewolves could heal or if they just had to deal with worn-down teeth like everyone else. He pushed that out of his mind and twisted to face Derek more fully, kneeling up on the couch.

"Derek, think of what this could do in the long run," he said. "The impact it could have on the public consciousness as a whole."

Derek shook his head, reluctance still rolling off him in waves. And Stiles couldn't blame him for that, not at all. He couldn't imagine how he would feel in Derek's position, tasked with facing the woman who murdered every one of the people he cared most about in the world, pushed toward a limelight harsh enough to burn him alive if he let it. But he thought of his friends and how fiercely they would fight for Derek, how hard the other deputies would push for Gerard to step down, how werewolves and allies all across the country would take up the challenge of getting _justice_ for the Hales.

He pushed on, imploring. "If there is anyone in the country with the slightest doubt in their mind about the shitty rhetoric that people like the Argents spew out every day, then this could get them on our side. This is the kind of senseless tragedy that can turn the tide of public favor and promote real change if only because people will _push_ for it on your behalf, and on behalf of your family. And if it puts Kate behind bars where she belongs and takes Gerard out of a position of power? Then so much the better."

Derek finally looked at him directly, and Stiles couldn't have looked away if he wanted to. Not that he did. To break their connection in that moment would've felt like a betrayal, like abandonment, a fresh trauma all its own. He wouldn't let Derek down like that, not now, and hopefully not ever.

Derek didn't flinch away when the Sheriff put a hand on his shoulder, didn't turn away from Stiles to look at him. He just, deliberately and with obvious effort, loosened his grip on the door frame, finger by finger until his arms fell limp at his sides. It would have looked like defeat if not for the set of his jaw, the unbowed head, the way his eyes glistened with more than tears now. He just needed a little more. Not a push, but maybe just a hand.

Stiles got to his feet, coming to stand in front of Derek, close but not touching. Derek just watched him, waiting, needing that something that he couldn't name.

"You won't be alone," Stiles said into the tense hush, and he heard Derek's sharp intake of as if it had been right in his ear, sending shivers down his spine. "The thing with a wire, is that there's always someone on the other end, monitoring, making sure you're okay. We will be right there with you, Derek. And we won't let anything happen to you."

Stiles watched the muscles work in Derek's throat as he swallowed, the way his hands twitched at his sides. Derek closed his eyes for a long minute, breathing deeply through his nose. Stiles wondered what Derek thought of his scent, if it was comforting by now where Kate's was disturbing or if he hadn't earned that sort of feeling yet.

When Derek finally opened his eyes, they were clear and sharp again.

"What do I have to do?"

* * *

 **Trigger warnings: more discussions of the aforementioned arson and murder. Derek has a small flashback but it's only see from Stiles' perspective.**


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: (See end of chapter for trigger warnings.)**

* * *

It took them another hour before they had the rough outline of a real plan in place. The Sheriff still needed to talk to his judge friend to get everything lined up and properly authorized so it would actually be a legal operation, and Stiles needed to talk to Allison and fill Scott in on all the intrigued he'd missed, but they had a plan that was functional and that Derek was okay with. Well, as okay as he could be with it, considering what it entailed for him. He was still far from happy, but he seemed to have decided the potential benefits were worth the inevitable emotional distress on his part.

It was just past two o'clock in the morning by the time the Sheriff called an end to their impromptu strategy session and declared that it was bedtime for all of them.

"Derek, Stiles will make up the couch for you," he said on his way up the stairs. "You can stay here as long as you need to; God willing, it won't be too long."

"You don't need to do that, sir," Derek said quickly.

The Sheriff just waved a hand at him. "Nonsense! It's no hassle, right, Stiles?"

"Right, Pops," Stiles said obediently. "G'night!"

His dad disappeared up the stairs, only leveling him with one suspicious glance because of the easy capitulation, and left the two of them standing alone in the living room. Derek didn't seem too happy with the couch—in fact, he was glaring at the thing as if it had personally offended him, though it didn't seem to be because he thought he was too good for couches, he was too nice for that—but he didn't say anything about it. He just shifted on his feet and cleared his throat into the awkward silence without following it up with words, which only served to make the silence even more awkward.

Stiles thought he'd give breaking the silence a try. "So, uh…"

It wasn't very effective. He scratched the back of his neck, struck with a sudden, irrational fear of leaving Derek alone. What if something happened to him overnight? What if his wound hadn't really healed and there was internal damage and he dropped dead because no one was there to take him to the hospital? What if he changed his mind and disappeared into the night never to be heard from again? Stiles wondered if it would be creepy to sleep in the arm chair just so that he could reassure himself of Derek's continued existence.

He decided that was definitely creepy.

"Couch. Right. Blankets."

Stiles jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the linen closet with all the extra bedding, about to go and fetch some, but Derek made a small, unhappy noise. He turned away right after, but Stiles could swear the tips of his ears were pink.

"Or…" Stiles said slowly. "You could...crash on my floor? I've got a sleeping bag that Scott uses sometimes, very warm and comfy with a built in pillow-type thing. That'd be easier than the whole blanket ordeal. Besides," he added with a shrug, "this couch will break your back." Not exactly true, but then Derek didn't need to know that.

Derek turned back to him and, yes, there was definitely a light blush on his cheeks. "You wouldn't mind?" he asked, suddenly shy.

Stiles offered him a wide, tooth smile. "Mind?" he scoffed. "Dude, I love slumber parties!"

Derek snorted, rolled his eyes, but he was smiling too, so Stiles called it a victory.

Stiles led the way up the stairs and to his bedroom with a pit stop at the hall closet to dig out the aforementioned sleeping bag. He pointed Derek toward the bathroom, told him there was an extra toothbrush under the sink, and set about laying the sleeping bag out on the most comfy piece of floor, which Scott had long since determined to be alongside Stiles' bed but slightly at an angle.

When Derek came back, the fringe of his hair was wet like he'd splashed his face, a few stray drops running down his neck and over his collarbone where it peeked out of the worn t-shirt. Stiles made the wise decision to look away this time before the sight could affect him. Derek gave the crooked sleeping bag a questioning look, but accepted Stiles' "just trust me" with no more than a shake of his head that looked almost fond, settling down cross-legged on it with his phone in hand.

Stiles lingered in the bathroom long after he had finished his own business, unaccountably nervous to go back to his room and see a beautiful werewolf laid out on his floor like all his best dreams come to life. He briefly considered rubbing one out as a preventative measure before remembering that Derek would still be able to hear him and he likely would not survive that humiliation.

He look a leaf out of Derek's book instead, splashing cold water on his face and how did people in commercials make this look so easy and not like a fucking disaster? He was sure Derek heard the splashing and hoped he would be merciful enough not to comment on the colorful cursing that came with it.

Derek was lying down when Stiles came back, phone held over his face as he tapped at the screen. Pausing to lean in the doorway, Stiles had the mental image of the phone falling on him, of him flailing in surprise like a normal awkward person, and had to cough to hide a laugh. Derek raised an eyebrow at him, unmistakably haughty, and Stiles got the impression that Derek knew exactly what he had just imagined and was judging him for it. Stiles gave him an exaggerated grin and Derek rolled his eyes.

Neither of them needed to change considering they were both already in Scott's slouchy sweats, which wasn't any different than what Stiles usually slept in, so Stiles threw himself down onto his bed with a long, drawn out groan. He loved his bed. He loved it a lot, especially now when his limbs felt like stretched out rubber bands and the bruise on his shoulder from the protest was throbbing in time with his heartbeat. He let himself be subsumed by the familiar comforter and buried his nose in his favorite pillow, the one he could recognize by scent even with his weak human nose.

Abruptly, the room went dark and Stiles had a moment of disorientation before realizing that Derek must have gotten up to turn off the lights himself, since Stiles was obviously in no condition to do it. Through half-closed eyes, Stiles watched the shadowy form that was Derek pick his way through the messy-ish room back to the sleeping bag with much more ease and grace than Stiles would ever have managed himself, but then he didn't have special nightvision courtesy of glowy eyes.

Stiles tried to sleep, he really did. He _wanted_ to sleep more than he had ever wanted to sleep before, and that was saying something because Stiles would rate sleeping pretty high on his list of favorite hobbies. But even exhausted and swaddled in darkness, he couldn't seem to drift off. He laid there and stared at the ceiling, counting what cracks in the plaster he could make out in the dimness from the streetlight outside his window; it was the same number as always and the ritual didn't do him much good.

He was too aware of Derek. Stiles could hear the soft rasp of his breathing, the _shuffle-zing_ sound of the sleeping bag's weird synthetic material as he shifted around. He was almost convinced that he could feel Derek's body heat, like him being there raised the temperature of the entire room until Stiles had to kick off his blankets or else burn up. He tried to keep from tossing and turning too much, not wanting to disturb Derek's rest when the guy really needed it, but he was restless and anxious and hyper-aware and it just wasn't working.

"Derek. Are you awake?" It barely even qualified as a whisper, just a breath that Stiles hoped was quiet enough not to wake Derek up if the answer was no.

But there was another rustle of fabric and Derek said, "Maybe."

Stiles snorted. "Obviously. Can't sleep?"

He could practically hear the smirk on Derek's face when he parroted back, "Obviously."

"Oh, ha ha. Big guy's got jokes, that's funny."

Derek chuckled but didn't jab back. Silence fell again, not exactly awkward but not completely comfortable either. Stiles licked his lips.

"Nervous?" he asked, and even a whisper seemed too loud for that question.

It seemed like a very long time before Derek answered, long enough that Stiles started to worry if he was offended and wasn't going to answer at all. Which would be fine and perfectly understandable and okay. It wasn't like Stiles had any right to pry anyway. Really, he should just learn when to keep his mouth shut; not that he hadn't been trying to train himself to do that for years, it just hadn't stuck so far. He should just roll over and pretend to sleep and stop bothering Derek when he obviously didn't—

"Of course I am."

Stiles turned his head, straining against the dark to see Derek's expression, but he couldn't catch more than a vague outline of his profile. Stiles cursed himself; he had asked the question and now he had no idea how to respond to the answer he got. He could offer platitudes, tell him it was going to be okay and the plan would go off without a hitch and he'd get a happily ever after, but honestly Stiles couldn't guarantee that. And Derek wouldn't appreciate empty words, no matter how well meant.

But he didn't want to say nothing either. He didn't want to stop talking to Derek, to stop hearing his soft voice and carefully chosen words. He cast around for something else to talk about, maybe a lighter topic, something like—

"What were you planning to do anyway? You know, after you had killed her?"

So much for a lighter topic, Stiles, way to go. He barely resisted the urge to smother himself in his own pillow. He held his breath, waiting for the explosion, for the growling and red eyes, for Derek to tell him to go fuck himself or at least to mind his own business.

Instead he got a quiet sigh and a strangely honest, "I don't know."

"You don't know?"

Stiles thought he saw Derek's outline shrug, but it was hard to tell with him lying down.

"I guess I just never thought that far ahead," Derek said. "Every moment of the last eight years I've spent building up to that. It was the only thing that kept me going."

And once the goal was achieved, he would have nothing, no reason to live. He wouldn't be a man on a mission anymore, Stiles realized, just a ghost with no family and no place in the world, not even a name to claim as his own.

"Would you have stayed here? As Michael Garrison?"

Derek made a thoughtful noise. "Maybe, if I could. I've got a decent life here, for all that it's not mine. A job and an apartment, friends I go out for drinks with on the weekends. If I had to live a lie, then I guess this is a pretty good one."

There was something in Derek's tone that Stiles couldn't place, something sad or wistful, and it made Stiles hands itch to reach out. He twisted them in the sheets to keep them where they were, to keep himself from bursting their little serene bubble and ruining whatever moment they were having.

"Are you going to be okay tomorrow?"

Stiles hadn't really meant to ask that. It was the sort of question that sometimes did more harm than good, like when you were barely holding yourself together and then someone asks if you're alright and you just lose it. He didn't want to make Derek lose it, didn't want to shatter whatever fragile hold he had on himself if he wasn't actually okay.

But Derek didn't burst into tears or anything, for which Stiles was immensely thankful; he had never been the most tactful person, really, so that would've been a disaster of epic proportions, he was sure.

"I think so," Derek said, thoughtful. "You guys will be right outside, so I should be fine, right? Fuck, maybe it'll even be a good thing. It's not like I haven't spent eight years thinking of all the things I'd say to her if I got the chance, it's just..."

"Just what?"

Derek's silhouette moved, shifting from the darker backdrop of the floor to the low backlighting of the window until he was sitting up, elbows on his bent knees and hands hanging limp. Stiles rolled onto his side to face him, scooting closer to the edge of the bed. Derek ran both his hands through his hair before dropping them again with a heavy sigh. When he spoke again, he kept his eyes on the floor rather than on Stiles.

"It's just… Everything was always my fault with her," he said, and Stiles had to strain to catch his words, they were so quiet. "Even when that made no sense. If she hurt my feelings, it was my fault for being too sensitive. If she got in trouble at work, it was my fault for being so distracting that she was always thinking about me. If she scratched me bloody during sex, it was my fault for being so irresistible and making her _crazy_. And besides, I would heal so what did it matter if she hurt me, right?"

Every inch of Stiles went cold, the upwelling of horror and disgust making his head swim; he had had his suspicions about the nature of Derek and Kate's relationship, such as it could be called, but hearing the extent of it. Hearing Derek speak of it so matter of factly, like it wasn't emotional and physical abuse, and statutory rape at the very least. He swallowed back bile and hoped that Derek didn't misinterpret the pounding of his heart.

"And I believed her, is the worst of it," Derek said with a half-chuckle that sounded so _defeated_ it brought tears to Stiles' eyes. "I was too sensitive, too immature, too weak and stupid. She was doing me a _favor_ , she said, because no one else would want such a little bitch. And I thought, she was a beautiful, sexy older woman—everything a teenage boy is supposed to want—so what was wrong with me that I didn't enjoy it?"

"Jesus, Derek."

No wonder he had been so terrified of the whole story getting out to the public. Stiles knew as well as anyone how male victims of sexual assault were treated by the media, by shitheads on the internet, even by the law enforcement that were supposed to be on the victim's side. Having to relive the trauma of his near death and the loss of his family was bad enough, but to open himself up to the special kind of ridicule that this would bring him? Stiles had half a mind to call the whole thing off himself just to spare him that, but Derek had agreed to the plan in the end. He had weighed the pros and cons and made his decision, and if he thought it might be worth it then Stiles couldn't do anything but support him and pray for the best.

"I know better now, I do," Derek told him. "I know it wasn't my fault, none of that stupid stuff was. But it took me a long time to realize that and seeing her again...it'll bring it all back, I know it will, only this time it'll be worse."

"Why worse?"

Derek chuckled again, bleak. "Because this time she'll be right. It was my fault."

"None of that was your fault, Derek. You just said—"

"Not what she did to me," Derek interrupted. "The fire. The fire was my fault."

Stiles stared at him, but the force of his disbelief did nothing to change the completely nonsensical words that had just come out of Derek's mouth. He pushed himself upright to sit on the edge of his bed, the better to squint at him through the dark, trying to make sense of something so very wrong. "How could you say that?"

"I told her what we were," Derek said. "Exactly like my mother made me swear not to do. I told her where the house was. I told her how to get in and out without being seen, when my relatives would be there, when they wouldn't. I gave her everything she needed and thirteen people ended up dead because of it. That's on me."

"No, Derek," Stiles said, putting every ounce of conviction he possessed behind that simple statement. "It's on _her_ and no one else."

The force of it was enough to get Derek to look his way for the first time since the conversation began. The light from the streetlamp glinted off of Derek's eyes, reflected back like with a real wolf's, giving them a flat, pale gleam that was different from their own natural glow. It made him look ethereal, otherworldly, especially with the sharp planes of his face highlighted with the barest touch of gold.

Derek opened his mouth, but Stiles didn't let him vocalize whatever protest he had to that statement.

" _No_. The fire was not your fault."

"But—"

" _Not. Your. Fault._ " Each word slow and deliberate and maybe a little obnoxiously drawn out, but Stiles had a point to make and he wanted to make sure that he made it. "Derek, nothing about this can be blamed on you," he said. "Kate is the one who seduced, abused, and manipulated a _child_ so that she could then _murder_ him and his family. All for the sake of her twisted specist worldview. None of that is on you, Derek, not a damn bit of it."

"She'll make it out to be," Derek said with a helpless shrug.

"And it'll be _bullshit_ ," Stiles bit out, fighting against the urge to get in his car right now, drive to the Argent house, and punch Kate in the face for ever making Derek feel this way, for wounding him so deeply that he still felt the effects even so many years later. "It was bullshit back then and it'll be bullshit tomorrow. It was _not_ your fault, Derek. Don't let her convince you that it was. Please."

For a minute he thought Derek might protest again, but in the end he just nodded. It wasn't exactly enthusiastic, it wasn't even particularly convincing, but it was something. And as Derek continued to just _look_ at him, piercing and unreadable, it occurred to Stiles that this was probably the first time Derek had ever said any of this out loud. He cleared his throat, heat creeping up the back of his neck.

"Does, uh...does anyone else even know that you're alive?" he asked.

Derek shook his head. "No one but Deaton."

"Wait, Deaton? Like, _Deaton_ Deaton? Dr. Deaton, the veterinarian from the clinic where Scott works, that Deaton?"

Derek snorted and the remaining tension in the room flew out the window in an instant. "Yeah, I guess," he said, eyeing Stiles like his completely justifiable confusion was silly. He shifted around until he was leaning against the side of the bed, his shoulder almost brushing Stiles' knee. "He was a good friend of my mother's. He took me in for a while when I escaped from the fire, kept me hidden, set me up out of the city later, even got me my fake papers when I needed a new identity."

"Wow," Stiles said. He didn't really know what to do with that information. Deaton had always had a weird vibe to him, a little bit shifty and just this side of creepy, but Stiles never would have expected he had criminal connections like that. At least he used them for good instead of evil; Stiles could only be grateful to him for getting Derek through what was undeniably the worst time of his life, even if it was through highly illegal means. He was hardly one to sit on a high horse there, so he could only judge the man's methods so much.

"Wait," he said, brow furrowing. "No one else? Not in all these years?"

Derek shook his head again. "Figured that would sort of defeat the purpose of pretending I was dead in the first place."

"But wasn't that...lonely?" That seemed like such an insufficient word. Eight years of no one so much as knowing his name.

Derek finally looked away and ran fingers through his hair, leaving it sticking up in tufts. "Maybe," he said, tone deceptively casual. "Guess I'm just used to it."

Stiles didn't think he would ever get used to something like that. Frankly, he didn't think Derek had either, but he kept that to himself. Human beings—and, yes, werewolves too, even big bad alphas—need contact with other human beings in order to function, to stay sane. To not have any meaningful connection with another person for eight years? He couldn't imagine.

"Well, hey. If things go as planned tomorrow, you can have your life back," Stiles offered. "Reclaim your name, be who you are again."

Derek laughed softly. "You say that like you think I _know_ who I am," he said, wry. "For a solid third of my life, I've been anyone _but_ Derek Hale. By now I think I know Michael Garrison better than I know myself."

"What will you do?" Stiles asked. "You know, best case scenario."

Derek considered it, bottom lip caught in his teeth. Then he smiled, small and honest and heartbreakingly sweet, and said, "Stay here, probably. This is my home. And I've got people here now. Can't leave them."

Stiles didn't think he was imagining the way Derek looked at him then. It was hardly the first time Derek had looked at him—he'd spent the last fifteen minutes practically having a staring contest with him, after all—but this was a different kind of _look_ , the kind that telegraphed something. And they were closer together than Stiles remembered being; he didn't know when he had leaned forward so much, elbows on his knees and head bent low, turned toward Derek. Derek, who was right beside him, pressed up against his thigh now and moving closer, head tilted and eyes half closed. It was the same thrilling moment from earlier in the night, when he had been certain that Derek was going to kiss him. This time there was no slamming door, no interrupting father, just him and Derek and the intimacy of late night confessions and it would be so easy to just—

" _Whoa_!"

Stiles nearly brained himself on his bedside table scrambling away from Derek, catching himself on the wall with a muted thud that he desperately hoped wasn't enough to wake his dad up again. He turned to press his back to the wall in the hopes that it would hold him up if his legs gave out from under him, and he couldn't stop his hands from making strange useless gestures of wordless frustration in front of him.

Derek stared after him, beautifully kissable mouth hanging open in surprise and, _wow_ , that image was not making this any easier.

"Stiles?"

"Can't" was all Stiles managed to make come out of his mouth, but it was accompanied by more flailing hand motions that probably did a very poor job of conveying...whatever it was they were hoping to convey. Honestly, Stiles wasn't entirely sure, things like that just happened sometimes, whether he wanted them to or not. The curse of spastic limbs and a short-circuited brain.

Derek closed his mouth, swallowed, and something in him closed off. Tension crept into his jaw and the line of his shoulders, all the comfortable easiness of him gone in a second. "I'm sorry," he said, stiff where before his words had flowed so easily, even they had obviously pained him. "I didn't... If I misinterpreted..."

"No!" This time Stiles did actually run into his bedside table, nearly knocking his lamp off it in his haste to reassure Derek. "No, no, you didn't misinterpret anything! It's just— I totally want to, dude, like you have no idea. _God_ , I want to kiss you so bad, but—"

Now Derek just looked utterly baffled, a little crease between his eyebrows and his fingers twisted into Stiles' bed sheets. "But what?"

Stiles mouthed at him for a minute, trying to put words into a sentence to explain why this might be a bad idea. He wasn't entirely sure himself, just knew that little red flags were going up all over his brain and telling him that he was in dangerous territory, proceed with caution.

"It's just, I don't know that this is a good time," he blurted out, which didn't seem to clear anything up for Derek. "I mean, you're in a very vulnerable emotional state right now, Derek! And with everything that's been going on, all that's happened in the last fourteen hours or so, I just don't think— I mean, you don't _owe_ me anything, if that's what this is! You don't have to, like, pay me back for helping you or—or being nice or whatever. Or! Or just because I'm the first person in a really long time to actually _know_ you! I mean, that's gotta be an intimate thing, like I get how that could be confused with—"

"Wait."

Stiles shut his mouth with a snap that hurt his teeth, swamped with equal parts relief, mortification, and fear. He watched warily as Derek got to his feet, still staring at him with that same expression on his face but also with arms crossed tightly over his chest now in what was clearly a defensive posture.

"Let me get this straight," Derek said, and Stiles was already cringing. "You won't kiss me not because you don't want to kiss me, but because you think I'm confused and too emotional to know if I actually want to kiss you or not?"

Just from Derek's tone, Stiles could tell that he had fucked up, but there wasn't a lot of backtracking he could do considering he had said it all out loud and Derek had summarized his panicked ramble fairly well. "Uh, well...yeah, I guess."

Derek gave him a truly impressive scowl. "You do realize how condescending that is, right?" he demanded, but he didn't give Stiles a chance to answer. "You're assuming that you know what I'm thinking and feeling better than I do, which you don't, and also that you have the right to decide whether or not I _act_ on what I'm feeling. That's for me to decide, Stiles. You don't get to take that choice away from me for some bullshit, sanctimonious reason."

Stiles' heart dropped into his stomach with a splash, the mortification eclipsing all else. "Oh god, Derek, I didn't mean—"

"You know, just because I made the mistake of letting someone else make my decisions for me in the past," Derek said with a bitter twist to his lips, "that doesn't mean I'm incapable of making them for myself. For fuck's sake, it's been eight years! And yeah, it's kind of been a rough day, but I'm not exactly a quivering wreck who needs to be led by the hand to what's good for him, so if that's wh—"

"Okay, okay!" Stiles threw up his hands in surrender, halting the flow of Derek's diatribe. "Derek, I'm sorry."

Derek immediately opened his mouth again, ready to launch into another impassioned speech, but then he stopped when Stiles' words registered. Some of his scowliness falling away, he asked, "You are?"

Stiles rubbed at the back of his neck to keep his hands from taking flight of their own accord again. "Well, yeah," he said. "You're right, I was out of line. I just...I don't want to take advantage of you, you know? I don't want to do anything that could hurt you, even on accident."

The last of Derek's irritation faded, arms uncrossing and the crease in his forehead smoothing out. "I appreciate you wanting to look out for me," he said. "But you can't just—"

"No, I get it! I do, I promise," Stiles said quickly. "That was shitty of me. I don't have any right to make assumptions or tell you how you're feeling like I know better, not even if it comes from a good place. I overcompensated on my good intentions and did more harm than anything else. I'm sorry and I won't do that again, promise."

Derek raised an eyebrow at him, the corner of his mouth twitching up into something like a smile. "Overcompensated on good intentions?" he repeated, sounding half-appreciative and half-mocking.

Stiles rolled his eyes. "Shut up, man. You know what I mean," he said with a groan. "Just, if this— _us_ —" He couldn't stop the flail this time, a hand flying back and forth between the two of them. "If we're gonna be a _thing_ , then I want it to be a _good_ thing. A healthy thing."

Derek smiled for real this time. He stepped closer, crowding Stiles against the wall with his body and settling his hands on Stiles' hips. "It can be," he said.

"Promise?" Stiles asked, hands fluttering uncertainly until they came to rest on Derek's unfairly solid biceps. "If you say that you're in a good place and want to do this, then I trust you on that. God knows I want this too. But promise me that you'll tell me if I fuck it up. If I do anything that makes you the slightest bit uncomfortable, even shit like this where I mean well, you call my ass out, okay?"

Derek laughed, warm breath ghosting across Stiles' neck and making him shiver. "I promise," he whispered, leaning in until their noses were almost brushing against each other. "Does that mean I can kiss you now?"

"Yes, please," Stiles said, breathless and shamefully eager.

It was every bit as amazing as Stiles had always imagined it would be and then some. He had spent months wondering how Deputy Garrison would kiss, if he would be fierce and aggressive or deep and passionate, if he would pin Stiles down and give it to him good or hold himself back and make Stiles work for it.

It turned out, Derek Hale was almost unbearably gentle in a way that Stiles never would have anticipated from such a large and muscular man. The first touch was so soft it made Stiles lips tingle and pulled a gasp from him, and the warm, chaste press of their mouths together was enough to make his heart skip a beat.

It was sweet and lingering and everything Stiles would never have thought to ask for in a kiss. It left him lightheaded and clutching at Derek's shoulders to stay upright, thankful for the sturdy wall at his back. He might have whimpered a tiny bit when Derek pulled away, but he didn't even care how embarrassing that was if it got him more of those kisses. He wanted _all_ of those kisses, as many as he could get, and it didn't matter if they never moved past that because those kisses were all he needed to survive for the rest of his life.

Derek just pressed one more quick kiss to the very corner of his mouth, though, and stepped back out of his space, leaving Stiles feeling chilled from head to toe from the sudden loss of his body heat. He took one of Stiles hands in his, lacing their fingers together, tugging him away from the wall and back toward the bed.

"Now that that's out of the way," he said lightly, "we really should get some sleep."

He pushed Stiles down to sit on the edge of the bed again and Stiles went willingly, still dazed and a little awestruck. Derek smiled down at him and ran the knuckles of his free hand down Stiles' cheek in an unbearably tender gesture that had Stiles' heart skipping so many beats he thought he might be having a legitimate arrhythmia. Then he turned to go back to the sleeping bag, but Stiles kept a tight hold of his hand and wouldn't let him get that far.

"Don't you know?" Stiles asked with his most innocent of expressions when Derek looked back, eyebrow raised in question. "This floor will break your back."

Derek laughed, shaking his head, but he allowed Stiles to tow him back in until he was stood in the V of Stiles' knees.

"I won't pull any funny business," Stiles swore. "Just some nice, wholesome snuggling. Sound good?"

"Very good," Derek said, leaning down to kiss him again.

Derek chivvied Stiles back onto the bed properly and climbed in after him, pulling the blankets up around them both. It took a few minutes of wriggling and negotiation for them to find a position that was comfortable for the both of them, but they finally settled with Derek on his back and Stiles sprawled out half on top of him with his head on Derek's chest, tucked up under his chin, an arm thrown over his waist and their legs tangled together. As sleep finally crept up on him, Stiles' last thought was that Derek smelled even better than his favorite pillow.

* * *

 **Trigger warnings: mentions of statutory rape, physical/emotional abuse, and the emotional aftermath.**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: (See end of chapter for trigger warnings.)**

* * *

Derek ran the leather belt through his hands, feeling the supple weight of it. It wasn't too thick, nothing garish or over the top, just a simple belt that he would readily wear on a daily basis. He fingered the square silver buckle, small enough to be unobtrusive.

"That's the switch right there," the Sheriff said, pointing to the bottom of the buckle and an inconspicuous little notch. "Flip that and it starts transmitting. Everything it hears will be sent back to us here in the van and recorded. Got it?"

Derek nodded, not trusting his voice. He threaded the belt through the loops of his jeans and made sure that the buckle was centered and that he could find the switch without looking; there was no way in hell he was going to suffer through this only to find that he had never managed to turn the damn wire on and it was all for nothing.

"Good," the Sheriff said, giving him a once-over and a thumbs up. Then he looked over his shoulder to where Stiles was leaning against the side of the nondescript surveillance van, one foot propped up behind him as he tapped away at an iPhone in a pink case, his own dinged up android tucked between his shoulder and his ear. "What's her ETA?" he called.

"I, as Allison, told her to be here for lunch at two," Stiles said, holding up Allison's iPhone and giving it a shake. Then he pointed at his phone, currently connecting him to where Allison was waiting with Scott back at his apartment. "She should be on her way by now, but according to the real Alli, she's usually fashionably late. So Alli estimates we've got about twelve minutes until showtime."

Twelve minutes, Derek thought. Twelve minutes until Kate was in front of him for the first time in eight years. Derek clenched his teeth and thanked god that everyone around him was human; a werewolf would have heard the way his heart was pounding out of his chest, smelled the sourness of fear in his sweat, but Derek had long since learned how to hide those things from weaker human senses. The Sheriff and Deputy Parrish accepted his stoic silence without question the way they always had. Only Stiles doubted it, watching him in a way he probably thought was subtle.

Derek leaned against the van, letting the others fiddle around with their equipment and make sure that everything was in place and ready to go, as Stiles hung up with Scott and Allison and shoved that phone in the pocket of his hoodie. Stiles side-eyed him, trying to pretend like he was terribly invested in nosing around in Allison's phone data when he must have known that his anxiety was rolling off him in pungent waves, unmistakable for anything else. Usually other people's nerves bothered Derek, gave him a sympathetic reaction that compounded his own apprehension, but something about Stiles being worried on his behalf only served to soothe him.

"I'll be okay," he said, glad that Stiles couldn't hear the blip in his heartbeat.

Stiles dropped the unconcerned act with a huff and stuffed Alli's phone in his other pocket, turning into Derek until they were sharing space, nearly toe to toe. Even sharp and unhappy as it was, his scent was comforting.

"I know you will be," Stiles said, but his thumb gave him away by tapping an incessant rhythm against his leg. "You remember the code though, right?"

The code. The phrase that would call the whole thing off, the safe word that would throw away all of this hard work and planning just because Derek was too weak and cowardly to face her. He remembered it, but he wouldn't use it, wouldn't disgrace himself like that.

"I do," he said anyway, just to reassure Stiles, who looked like he might vibrate right out of his skin at any second.

"Okay, good," Stiles said. He brought his hand up so he could bite at his knuckles between words. "I'll be in the van," he told Derek for the fourth time in the last six hours. "Procedurally speaking, I really shouldn't be, but it's just my dad and Parrish in there, and Jordan is super laid back so he's not gonna rat me out. So I'll be listening, ready to come in the second you say the word. Really, Der, just one word—one _syllable_ , even—and I'll be right there to punch her in the godda—"

"Stiles." Derek reached up to tug Stiles' abused knuckles away from his mouth, wrapping Stiles' hand in both of his own. "I get it. And thank you."

Stiles wiggled his hand around until he could lace his fingers with one set of Derek's. "For what?"

Derek shrugged, unsure how to put into words exactly how much Stiles had done for him in the last twenty-four hours alone. "Everything," he said simply. "Still being here, even with all this mess. I know it's a lot to swallow."

Stiles squeezed his hand and leveled him with an utterly serious expression that only looked a little bit out of place on a face that was obviously meant to be smiling. "It's worth it for you, Derek," he said. "You're worth every bit of it. Don't forget that."

Derek felt heat creep up on his cheeks, had to look away from dark, gold-tinted eyes that always saw so much more than they were meant to. An answering warmth bloomed in his chest, though, and he pulled Stiles forward until he could wrap him up in an embrace. Stiles hugged him back, arms wrapped tightly around Derek's waist. Derek buried his face in Stiles' neck and took a moment to just breathe, making sure that the scent and all the care in it was embedded in his memory too deeply to forget.

"Just remember what we talked about last night," Stiles murmured into Derek's shoulder, fingers digging into the small of his back and holding on. "Not your fault, okay?"

Derek nodded as best he could, unwilling to move away enough to do it properly; he only had a few more minutes before he would have to go inside the restaurant they had chosen for the sting and wait alone until Kate arrived, and he wanted to make the most of it. Stiles seemed to have the same idea because he settled more comfortably into the hug with a contented sigh and swayed gently from side to side for several more minutes.

Derek knew their time was up when he heard the Sheriff's footsteps coming around the side of the van toward them. It took all of his carefully cultivated self control to pull away from Stiles, to push Stiles back to a respectable distance and not even keep a hold of his hand, but he did it. He took comfort in the fact that Stiles looked just as reluctant to part.

"It's time?" he asked as the Sheriff rounded the corner.

The Sheriff had that look of grim determination on his face that Derek was so familiar with from their months of working together, the one he wore when he had an unpleasant job to do but intended to do it right. All the same, he did manage to offer Derek a sympathetic smile when he said: "I'm afraid so, son."

Derek took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and blew it out slowly through pursed lips. Then he gave himself a shake that was as much mental as it was physical and took Allison's phone wordlessly when Stiles offered it up to him, pocketing it himself. With one more quick kiss pressed to Stiles' cheek, not even caring if the Sheriff saw and heedless of the blush it got out of Stiles, he left the surveillance van behind and entered the restaurant alone.

It was largely empty, only the hostess and a handful of servers lingering around to make it look like the place was actually open for business when really all the restaurant's reservations had been cancelled and they would be turning anyone other than Kate away at the door. The hostess directed him toward one of the smaller private rooms in the back with something that might have been an attempt at a smile. Derek nodded in thanks and followed her instructions.

There was a table large enough to seat six, empty now of table settings and silverware; they all knew no one would actually be eating here today and it was thought unwise to have anything weapon-like within arm's reach in this situation, just in case. The walls were a muted green on top with wooden paneling from waist-height down, tasteful landscape paintings here and there and a few dark wood cabinets with decorative vases and statuettes on them. It was a nice restaurant and Derek had it on good authority that the food was top notch. It was a shame he would probably never be able to bring himself to come back here after today; he had been looking forward to trying it sometime.

In a way, he was glad for the choice of venue. Back when he and Kate had been involved, this was something they had never done together. He had been Kate's dirty little secret, always hidden away and kept in the dark where no one but her could see him. There had been no movie dates unless they went to the next town over, no dinners at nice restaurants like this, no public outings where someone might see them together. There were no memories here, no associations to drag him back down to the boy he had been then. It was a neutral location, one that gave him some stable ground to stand on.

He stood with his back against the far wall, a bit to the side of the half-closed door so that he would see her before she did him, and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans to hide their shaking even from himself. Derek would have thought the waiting was the worst part if he hadn't been sure that things would only go downhill from there. For better or for worse, he only had to wait a few minutes before his cell phone buzzed in his back pocket. He pulled it out to find a text from Stiles: _on her way in to you_.

Derek took another deep breath even as he strained his hearing to verify, searching out the clip of heeled boots on hardwood floors and the chipper greeting of the hostess in the main room. He stowed his phone and fumbled with the belt buckle. It took him three tries to flip the tiny switch because his fingers didn't seem to want to obey his commands but eventually he saw the little red light on the top of the buckle flash once before going dark again and he knew that it was transmitting.

Her scent hit him before she even reached the room and he cursed the fact that she still wore the same goddamn perfume she had worn back then. Scent was one of the most powerful triggers of memory, even more so for a werewolf, and he couldn't help the up-welling of primal fear and horror that this particular scent engendered in him. He fought down the urge to turn tail and run, or to roll over and bare his throat in the hopes that it would be enough to satisfy her and spare him anything worse. Instead, he just pressed his back harder against the steadying wall and held his breath.

"Not exactly a busy day for them, is it, Alli?" came Kate's voice from halfway down the hall and Derek flinched when it reached his ears, no matter how innocuous the words or that they weren't even meant for him. "No wonder you snagged us a back room. They probably paid _you_ to ta—"

Kate Argent hadn't changed much since 2008, physically speaking. Her hair was a bit longer, a bit darker than the sun-bleached blonde it had been back then, but it still framed a beautiful face: defined cheekbones and sharp chin; full lips and a long, straight nose; clear, wide-set blue eyes and perfectly sculpted eyebrows. She was still fit and athletic, with generous curves in all the right places to make men on the street stop and stare.

Derek stared too, though not for the same reasons.

Kate stared back at him, frozen in the doorway with her mouth hanging open in shock at finding, not her beloved niece, but a strange man waiting for her. Derek saw it on her face the moment she recognized him. Her eyes narrowed, roving slowly over him from head to toe in a way that made him flush, and then those generous lips of hers curved up into a smirk.

"Allison's not coming, is she?"

Derek pulled Allison's iPhone out of his back pocket and held it up in answer.

Kate's smirk widened. "Clever," she conceded.

She kicked the door shut behind her. The click of the latch, the shutting off of his only escape route, made sweat break out on the back of Derek's neck, but he didn't allow himself to react beyond the clenching of his fingers around the phone, tight enough to make the hard plastic case creak in protest. He couldn't bring himself to take his eyes off of her, needed to be completely sure of her position at all times; that much was instinct, too deeply ingrained to ignore.

"Did you steal it?" Kate asked, unconcerned. "Did you hear I was going to be in town, track down my niece, and steal her phone so you could lure me here?" She tsked at him, sauntering closer. "All that work just to see me again when you could have just called. It's been a long time, Derek Hale, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't pick up for you."

Derek swallowed hard; her voice was warm honey, low and smooth and deceptively sweet, and his name fell so easily from her lips. It sounded dirty, _obscene_. Once he had found that appealing, but now it made his skin crawl, like that honeyed voice had brought a whole swarm of bees with it.

"Not long enough," he said, and how had he thought he could ever be in a room with her without feeling like this? His original plan to rip her throat out with his teeth seemed laughable now when he could barely bring himself to look her in the eye.

Kate chuckled like he'd said something funny and charming. She skirted the table, running her fingertips over the wood. Her nails caught in the grooves, clicking and dragging. She didn't seem to notice but every sound grated against Derek's already frayed nerves, making him twitch.

Kate looked him over again, eyes lingering on his chest, his arms. "I gotta say, Der, you grew up in all the right places."

She was still advancing, steps slow and measured, and Derek suddenly regretted the position he had taken up; sure, the back to his wall protected his flank and made sure he had no blind spot, but it also meant that he had nowhere to go when she pushed into his space. Even when she reached out to drag her fingernails across his stomach like she had the tabletop, he couldn't do much more than flinch. He bit his tongue to keep from making the pathetic noise that welled up in his throat, partly because he didn't want to give her that satisfaction, but partly because he couldn't bear for Stiles, listening out in the van, to hear him laid low like that.

It was the thought of Stiles, of his fierce defense of Derek the night before, that gave him the strength to push Kate's hands away and growl out, "Don't touch me."

For a second, Kate looked genuinely surprised. Then she tilted her head to the side, expression wide-eyed and innocent. "That's not what you said last time. You definitely wanted me to touch you then."

A shudder of revulsion took him over, strong enough to make Derek drop the phone onto the hardwood floor with a clatter, as he remembered the last time and all the times before. He felt her hands on him again even though she had stepped back now, felt the brush of skin against heated skin all down his body. He remembered the way he had craved more and she had pulled back again and again, making him beg and plead and _cry_ , refusing to give him anything until he had been _good_ enough. As if he could ever be good enough, whatever that meant to her on that particular night.

Kate was watching him, drinking in his reaction to her taunts, _relishing_ in the way he shook and cringed away. The thrill she got out of it was so obvious, how had he never seen it for what it was back then? How had he been so blind, so _stupid_ as to think she actually cared about him when this was all she wanted? To see him fall apart, to break him down and know it was because of her.

He felt the sting of his fangs descending, the prick of claws that he immediately dug into the wood behind him. A snarl forced its way past his lips as his vision sharpened, deepened in that way it only did when he was shifted. "I didn't want that," he told her, finally, like he wished he had done so long ago. God, why hadn't he just _said_ it back then? Would it have even made a difference to her if he had? "I was a _kid_! I didn't know what I wanted!"

Kate just raised her eyebrows at him.

"Ooh," she said, and it would've sounded impressed if it weren't so obviously feigned. "Are those mommy's alpha reds I see?"

The alpha power, the one that Derek had never wanted, had never been well-suited for. The only reason he had it at all was because every other member of his pack was dead, every single one of them. And that was because of the woman standing before him, _mocking_ him with what she had done. He couldn't have made his eyes stop glowing if he tried, and there was a constant rumble deep in his chest as he fought the urge to howl out the sudden grief that hit him low in the gut like a suckerpunch.

Kate pursed her lips in a moue of confusion, not that it looked any more genuine than the rest of the emotions she had shown him so far. "I thought those eyes were supposed to go to Laura," she said, then she brought her hand up to cover a deliberate gasp, apparently mortified. "Oh wait! I almost forgot. Big sister bit it before she could have her first litter."

The only thing that kept Derek from sinking his teeth into the vulnerable curve of Kate's neck was the wire he was wearing and the knowledge that he hadn't gotten a full confession yet. They needed that confession, he told himself, digging his claws deeper into the wall to stop himself from lashing out ripping that fucking _smirk_ off Kate's face. The confession was the only way that this would end well. That was the way that he could honor Laura's memory, that he could finally lay her and all the others to rest.

He struggled to breathe through the tightness in his chest and screwed his eyes closed, but even then he could feel Kate's pale eyes on him.

"You know, I was under the impression that you met the same toasty end as big sis," she said, and this time some real curiosity seeped into her tone. "Obviously that intel was somewhat unreliable. So tell me, Derek. How'd you do it? How'd you get out?"

"That's none of your damn business," he snapped, not wanting to think about that, not wanting to go back to that place and all the pain and terror that came with it. He had spent so long locking that away. It had been bad enough the night before, looking at those arrows and wondering if he had heard the _swish-thunk_ of them landing and just not recognized it for what it was over the crackle of rising flames, fire crawling up the curtains to the dance along the rafters with the smoke, smoke roiling up to make him cough, choking him—

"Oh, sweetie, there's no reason to be like that," Kate said with a cluck of her tongue. "We were just having a conversation. No need to be so sensitive."

Even as she scolded him, Kate's fingers walked their way up his chest to brush against the hollow of his throat. He slapped them away with more force this time, his head jerking back until it hit the wall. "I said _don't touch me_."

Kate tossed her hair over his shoulder in irritation and a wave of her scent hit him, making his throat close up, choking him just like the smoke he could still taste on the back of his tongue like bile. She sneered at him, all pretense of sweetness and innocence gone.

"Jeez, Derek, you're such a fucking prude. I don't know what I ever saw in you."

Derek _hated_ that that hurt. He _hated_ that it still mattered what she thought of him, that some pathetic thing in the pit of his stomach still wanted to please her. He _hated_ that something in him still thought that, maybe, if he could just be _better_ then she would go back to how she was before. Back when he had buried his nose in her neck to chase that scent and it had meant laughter and fun and happiness. He knew it was a lie now, it had all been a lie, but he couldn't get away from that scent as she invaded his space again, pushing in until she was pressed flush against him from knee to shoulder, her lips brushing against his jaw.

"You're lucky you had me," she purred, "or you'd never have gotten laid."

Derek shoved her back, flinging sideways along the wall and out of her reach. He nearly crashed into one of those cabinets with a vase on top, but he didn't care. Anything—just _anything_ —to get away from her, to get that overwhelming fucking _scent_ out of his nostrils, to escape the feel of her fingers digging into his hips to keep him in place, to hold him down. He was breathing hard and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. He felt like he might be sick and the code phrase hung on the tip of his tongue.

It would be so easy to say it. A few simple words and the Sheriff would be there to get him out, to take him away somewhere so that he would never have to see her again. And Stiles would be at his side in a second to wrap Derek up in his spicy scent, all natural, all _him_ , full of warmth and worry and care. Just a couple of words and this nightmare would be over—

But it wouldn't. It would never be over, because Kate would still be out there and this time she would know that he was too. Derek would spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, waiting for her to show up again, to track him down and finish the job she had started so many years ago. He would never be rid of her unless he got that confession, he knew that, yet here he was letting her _play_ with him all over again.

Derek planted his hands on the table, leaning heavily for the sake of his shaking legs. He swallowed back the code phrase, and the bile that was threatening to edge its way up his throat, and clenched his teeth to keep it all where it was. By the time he could bring himself to turn around and face Kate again, she had one shoulder against the wall, arms crossed over her chest and one foot kicked up onto its boot tip.

She raised a single eyebrow at him and said, "Are you finished with your tantrum?"

Unimpressed, condescending, like he was some toddler throwing a fit and she didn't have time for his nonsense. Derek dug his claws into the palms of his hands, let the sting of it push through the haze of conflicting emotions and give him back some scant measure of control. He said nothing.

Kate pushed off the wall with a heavy, put-upon sigh and came toward him again, hips swinging with every step. "Derek, sweetie," she said, smiling in that particular, _sharp_ way of hers. "I asked you a question earlier. I even asked it nicely, and you know I only do that once."

A drop of ice slid down Derek's spine and he tensed all over, already anticipating the brunt of her displeasure, but she didn't lash out. Instead she looped her index fingers through his belt loops, tugging his hips forward. This time he didn't push her away; she was always more agreeable when she got her way, he remembered, and maybe if she thought she was winning then she would speak more freely.

The rationale didn't keep him from shivering when her knuckles edged up under his shirt to brush against the bare skin of his stomach.

Kate's smile widened. "See, isn't this nice?" she asked, pushing forward more confidently now that he wasn't moving away anymore. "Now be a good boy," she said, "and tell me how you got out of that house alive."

"I will," Derek said through gritted teeth. "But only if you tell me why you did it."

Kate laughed, throaty and sounding truly amused for once. "A bargain, Derek? You really think you're in a position for bargaining?" She scoffed. "You don't exist, Der! That doesn't leave you with a lot of leverage."

"Just tell me why," Derek repeated, harsher.

"Or else what?" she asked, less amused. "It's not like you can call the cops on me. You're between a rock and a hard place here, babe. So why don't you just tell me what I want to know and then maybe I won't feel the need to alert the authorities of your continued existence."

Derek's teeth squeaked against each other, his jaw aching from the effort of holding his tongue. Kate's hands on him were distracting, running insistently along his sides now, nails catching and pulling in the fabric of his shirt. Her threat was pointless, what with the Sheriff and his deputy listening to every word that passed between them and waiting for their moment to swoop in, but Kate didn't know that. He couldn't let her know that, needed to keep up the ruse and keep her talking; he had no choice but to give her what she wanted.

Derek kept his eyes open, fixed on the ice blue of her eyes to hold the fire in his memories at bay, but that didn't do anything about the screams that echoed in his ears. He never managed to block those out, no matter how hard he tried.

"I broke a window in the living room," he told her, feeling again the way the shattered glass sliced open the back of his hand as he punched through the pane, the way the gashes kept bleeding because all his energy was focused on healing where the flames had already licked across his left leg and half of his back. "Crawled out and made for the woods."

Kate nodded, but she was obviously waiting for more. When he wasn't forthcoming, her eyes narrowed dangerously and she dug her fingernails sharply into his sides without warning.

"And the mountain ash line?" she asked, voice hard. "Couldn't break that on your own."

Derek would have pulled away from her then if he could, but the table was a hard, unforgiving line against the back of his thighs and Kate's weight kept him pinned against it. He did close his eyes this time, fighting down the panic that came with being _trapped_ , with slamming his fists against the iridescent forcefield that zinged with electricity not half as painful as the fire at his back, with throwing himself bodily against it over and over again until his ribs broke and still it wouldn't budge. Not even the fact that Kate shouldn't have known about the mountain ash— _couldn't_ have known, it wasn't even in the report, wasn't documented anywhere—unless she was involved could get through to him.

Kate dug her nails in deeper, breaking skin, and Derek could feel the hot trickle of blood.

" _How_ , Derek?" she demanded.

"Cassie," he gasped, wishing now that Kate would get that much closer in the hopes that her scent would blot out the remembered stench of cooking flesh and boiled blood, all of it underlaid with the ozone tang of the mountain ash barrier.

"What was that? Come on, Der, use your big boy words for me."

"Cassie," he said again, dragging himself out of the memory, back to some sort of clarity, with the stab of his own claws into the meat of his thighs. "My cousin. My twelve year old, _human_ cousin. She collapsed, broke the line on accident."

Suddenly Kate's oppressive presence was gone and Derek almost fell forward without her weight to hold him upright. She stood back with her arms crossed again, looking faintly annoyed as Derek struggled to catch his breath and quell the worst of his shaking.

"If little Cassie broke the line," she asked, disdain dripping from her tone, "then why isn't she here too? Did you leave her behind?"

"She was already dead," Derek bit out, though that didn't do it justice. Destroyed, more like. Charred and blackened, almost unrecognizable by the time what was left of her had tipped over onto the ash and punched a hole through its power. "They all were. I was the only one who lived long enough to take advantage of the breach."

Kate shrugged, utterly dismissive, and Derek saw red in more ways than one. He didn't stop to think about the cops outside, what Stiles would think, or even whether or not Kate could be armed. He had her pinned to the far wall before she even saw him coming, his forearm like an iron bar across her throat.

"She was a _child_!" he snarled, words slurred around the fangs he couldn't contain. "She was a _human child_ , Kate!"

Kate was hardly fazed by the enraged alpha werewolf in her face, though one hand did come up to grip onto his wrist in a futile, reflexive attempt to hold him at bay. She rolled her eyes. "Hardly," she said, strained but not afraid. "There's always a few runts in the litter, but I wouldn't call them human."

With his feral desire to rip Kate's beating heart out of her chest and crush it in with his bare hands, Derek was feeling a bit inhuman himself. It was a vicious, primal thing, and yet Derek was certain he would feel the exact same way werewolf or not. Revenge was a human drive more than anything else, borne of human anger and human grief, the kind that gaped inside and threatened to swallow him whole if he let it. It would be so easy to fall, just a twist of his wrist, a flick of his claws, and Kate would be gone just like the rest of them. And so would any chance of his having a life after this.

Blood trailed down Derek's forearm, dripped to the floor from how deeply his claws were sunk into his palms, and even that was barely enough to keep him focused, to remind him of his mission.

"Everyone I loved," he said, voice breaking. " _Everyone_ I ever cared about is dead. Because of _you_."

Kate had the audacity to _smile_ , and there something almost like exhilaration in the glint of her eye. "You can't prove it though, can you, sweetie?" she asked, smug. "My dear old dad made sure of that."

Derek bit his tongue until it bled, swallowed down the coppery tang of it, held his breath until the new upsurge of fury dampened enough for him to say, "Gerard?" For the recording, so there could be no denying it.

"It was easy, you know," Kate said with a wheezy, breathless laugh. "So easy for him to bury. A few bribes here, a few threats there. A couple of like-minded peers who didn't mind looking the other way. Ladies and gentlemen, we have an accident."

"Firing flaming arrows into a house full of people you've already trapped inside isn't an accident," Derek growled, and he had to pull his arm away from her throat or risk crushing it entirely. He dug his claws into the plasterboard on either side of her head instead, fencing her in. "It's _murder_. They're dead because of _you_."

Kate licked her lips, eyes sharp and calculating in a way that made cold fear bubble up underneath the rage.

"You say that like I worked alone," she said, and somehow the hoarseness of her voice didn't make it any less syrupy sweet. "But if I recall, I had a little help from my inside man."

Derek flinched like she had hit him, all that burning anger doused by the chill of her words. The abruptness of it shook him and he lost his claws, scrabbling for purchase on the wall with blood-slick human fingers.

"That's right, Derek," Kate said, encouraging or maybe goading, he couldn't tell when his head was spinning, breaths coming too fast. "You know I couldn't have done it without you."

Derek jerked away, knocking a chair to the ground before he collided with the table and could go no further. He clutched at the table's edge hard enough to crack the wood, eyes screwed shut against the burn of tears, shaking his head no, no, _no, no no no no_ —

Kate was there again, right there, leaning into him with her perfume and her eyes that gleamed with more feral pleasure than a human had any right to. She took a hold of his chin, viper quick, and yanked his head up so that he had no choice but to look at her.

"You were such a good helper, baby," she crooned. "Do you remember? You told me everything I needed to know."

Derek did remember. He remembered when he first told her about his pack, ignoring his alpha's orders, tucked contentedly into her side as she pet his hair and called him her perfect little man. He remembered telling her about the broken latch on the window in the garage, the one she could use to get in if she wanted to see him, but she would have to be quiet. He told her when his mother would be gone, when Laura would be off at school, told her that Peter and his kids would be there to visit but would be gone by Friday, he told her everything, told her—

 _Not your fault_.

Derek latched onto the memory of Stiles' words, the low rasp of his voice so different from Kate's smooth, unctuous tone. He let the words repeat in his head, _not your fault, it was not your fault, Derek, don't let her convince you it was, not your fault, not your_ —

But Kate was still there, her fingertips digging into his jaw and her perfume-scented hair falling over his face, surrounding him with her, her everywhere and her voice in his ear.

"You were so eager to tell me, Der," she said, an intimate murmur of sound that was still loud enough to drown out every thought in Derek's head.

 _Not your fault, not your fault it was not your fault, it was, you were so eager, your fault, you told me everything, such a good helper, your fault, your fault, it was_ —

Kate leaned in that last little bit so that her lips brushed against his as she said, "It's almost like you wanted them dead as much as I did."

The crash of the door being kicked open barely even registered for Derek, everything in his mind frozen in place, too stunned to react. There was shouting and fighting and more crashing noises that meant nothing to him. Kate was gone, dragged away, but the scent of her lingered on Derek's skin like the echo of her words in his ears. He wanted to scrub it off but he couldn't move, couldn't feel through the tingling numbness that had overtaken his extremities, couldn't think past your fault, _your fault, such a good helper, Derek, it was your fault, it was, so eager to, almost like you wanted them_ —

And then there was spice and damp earth, soft red fabric in front of him eclipsing all else, the sour aftertaste of fear and the bitter flavor of helplessness. There were words being said, probably to him. They didn't penetrate, but that scent. Every breath of it warmed Derek from the inside out until he was gasping, burying his face in the sea of red that was Stiles' stomach and clinging with everything he had. Stiles' hands were gentle as they carded through his hair, stroked down his back, rubbed the back of his neck in soothing circles.

Stiles was still talking, repeating over and over again: "It wasn't your fault, Derek. You're not responsible for any of it. It was all her, every last bit of it. Do you hear me, Derek? It wasn't you. It was not your fault. None of it was, okay? Not your—"

Derek didn't believe him, _couldn't_ believe him with Kate's voice still ringing in his ears, but he listened anyway because the lie was comforting.

"—gonna be okay, Derek, I promise. It's over. She's gone, I swear, and she'll stay that way. We got more than enough, and she's gonna go away for a long time. You hear? It's over, Derek. It's all over."

Derek wasn't sure he believed that either. But Stiles' heartbeat was steady and unwavering in his chest as he said it again, so Derek just let Stiles wrap strong arms around his shoulders. Neither of them let go until long after the shaking had stopped.

* * *

 **Trigger warnings: Kate and everything that comes with her. Unwanted touching, gaslighting, emotional manipulation, victim blaming. Flashbacks and some disturbing fire-related images. Considerable emotional distress on Derek's part of a kind that might read as a panic attack (honestly I'm not sure, I've never experienced one).**


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: (See end of chapter for trigger warnings.)**

* * *

The number flashing on the screen of his phone was blocked, but Stiles had a lot of numbers blocked by now and he was always adding to the list so that didn't narrow it down much. He kicked the door of the Jeep shut, slung his messenger bag over his shoulder, and picked up anyway.

Generic Reporter #73 from Newspaper Whichever started in on his spiel immediately, talking fast like he expected Stiles to hang up on him before he was finished. Which was a fair expectation to have, really; Stiles had something of a reputation of uncooperativeness when it came to this. The local reporters had learned their lesson by now, but the more stubborn out-of-towners still made a good go of it every few weeks.

"Look, pal," Stiles butted in, bulldozing through the guy's speech as he tromped up the three flights of stairs to his apartment. "Derek will put out a statement when he's got something to say. Until then, keep your nose out of it, and I swear to god if you put in your article that Derek refused to comment just because he's not right next to me at this exact moment ready and eager to answer your invasive questions, I will shove this phone so far up your—"

The reporter hung up. Stiles shrugged and pocketed his phone; it wasn't the first time that had happened. Either the guy would call back later to try his luck again or he would put something vague and suggestive in his article to make it sound like he'd gotten more than he had, but it didn't much matter either way. Journalists weren't known for their integrity and this wouldn't be the first article where Derek was "quoted" as saying a whole lot of things he had never said in his life. They would deal with it later like they always did.

When Stiles finally reached their door—and whose idea was it to live on the third floor? Had that been him? Why the fuck—he stopped in his tracks.

There was a dog bowl leaning up against the base of the door, red plastic with _Derek_ hand-painted on it in black. Who did shit like that? Really, someone had actually taken the time out of their busy schedule to go to the pet store and buy a dog bowl, then paint Derek's name on it, track down Derek's home address, and drive all the way out here just to make sure that Derek knew how lowly they thought of him. As if anyone gave a flying fuck what one specist asshole thought. Sadly, it wasn't the first time this had happened either.

Stiles resisted the urge to give the bowl a good hard kick and send it flying, but it was a close thing. Instead he took a few deep breaths and picked it up, tucking it under his arm so he didn't have to look at the stupid thing and be reminded of how much the world and all the people in it sucked sometimes. He went straight to the kitchen where he could dump the bowl in the trash without Derek having to see it, though he undoubtedly knew it was there, and doubled back to throw his backpack onto the bedroom floor before finally making his way to the living room.

Derek was cross-legged on the couch, the television turned down low on some silly sitcom. He had a book in one hand and his phone in the other, glancing back and forth between them periodically because he was a multitasker like that. Not as much of a multitasker as Stiles, to be fair, but the fact that he could function this well at a time when he was usually still asleep was something else entirely. Stiles couldn't blame him for being awake today though, night shifts be damned. Stiles had considered staying home today just to be with him, but Derek had all but shoved him out the door that morning with a promise that he would be _fine_.

To his credit, Derek did look fine, very cozy in worn sweatpants and one of his favorite long-sleeved shirts with the thumb holes sewn into the cuffs, barefoot and with hair just a little bit damp from a recent shower. He didn't look up when Stiles came in, absorbed in whatever it was he was reading, but he did hum in greeting.

Stiles came up behind him, dropped a kiss on the top of his head, and then collapsed over the back of the couch with a huff, his entire top half flopped down and arms sprawled and face smushed into the couch cushions. He heard Derek snort and knew there was an exasperated eye-roll to go with it, but Derek didn't comment on the melodrama. He just reached over to rub circles between Stiles' shoulder blades and said, "Rough day?"

Stiles gave a long, wordless groan that was made even more unintelligible by the muffling of the cushions, then turned his face just enough to free his mouth up for actual speech.

"Grad school is tiring enough without being hounded by journalists," he said. "Is it illegal for them to follow me to class?"

"Probably."

Stiles humphed and nuzzled into the couch again, ignoring the way his position was sending all the blood rushing to his head because Derek's hand on his back felt too good to dislodge just yet.

"Who was that on the phone?" Derek asked. "You smell upset."

Stiles' attempt at a shrug was laughably ineffective considering he was upside down, so he shoved himself up until he was more or less horizontal, propped up on his elbows. "No one important."

Derek's lips pursed like he didn't believe that, but then Stiles knew his scent had to be giving him away so he couldn't begrudge his boyfriend his skepticism. Stiles nudged their shoulders together, offering up a smile.

"Nothing to worry about, lovemuffin," he said. "Though we should probably put out a statement soon or we're gonna start getting hounded for real. It'll be like June all over again, and no one wants a repeat of June."

Derek sighed, carefully marking his page and laying his book on the side table. "Yeah, I guess I should. Do we still have that lady's number from HuffPost? She was nice enough."

"Yeah, I think we do somewhere," Stiles said, making a mental note to dig around in the gigantic mess that was his desk and see if the little slip of paper had survived last semester. "Are you gonna be up for a real interview in the next few days? Or would you rather I throw out a tweet on your behalf and give you a while to work up to it? I wouldn't be surprised if you got another interview request from CNN."

"If CNN calls, give them Allison's number instead," Derek suggested with a smirk. "I'm sure she would _love_ to give them her thoughts."

Stiles laughed. "I don't think CNN is _ready_ for Allison McCall. I'm pretty sure _they've_ been dodging _her_ calls for the last two years. They've had plenty of activists on air, but not a one of those anchors can stand up to her and they know it."

"She's fierce, that's for sure," Derek said. "I'm just glad she's on my side."

"We're all on your side, sugarplum," Stiles said, leaning in to poke him in the side then staying close just for the sake of it. "You know, a random girl in one of the classes I teach stayed late this morning and gave me a very heartfelt speech about how much you as a public figure have meant to her, how much solace she takes in knowing that she's not alone and that people like you are out there still making it through the day."

A small smile tugged at the corner of Derek's mouth, but it was sad. Smiles like that were always sad. He had gotten a lot of messages like that, personal affirmations and testimonials, handwritten letters thanking him for his courage and sacrifice and sharing their own stories, some of which were nearly as tragic. Stiles knew that Derek tried to read and respond to them all, but sometimes they sat on the kitchen table for weeks. Sometimes it was just too much for him to handle, too much to be everyone's idol. Stiles understood that.

"How did your student feel about the sentencing?" Derek asked, still flicking through something on his phone, though Stiles couldn't see what it was from this angle. His face was blank and his tone flat, neither one telling Stiles anything at all about his state of mind. Stiles heaved himself fully upright again and came around to collapse on the couch the normal way, kicking off his shoes and turning around sideways so he could worm his bare toes under Derek's left thigh.

"How do _you_ feel about the sentencing?" he asked.

Derek sighed, rubbing at his eyes in that way he did sometimes that made Stiles wonder if maybe he needed glasses and was just too stubborn to admit to it. He sounded so tired when he spoke that it made Stiles' heart clench in sympathy.

"I don't know," Derek admitted, eyes unfocused even as he kept scrolling, right thumb tracing up and down the screen in a regular pattern that seemed more soothing than purposeful. "She was convicted. That's what we wanted, right? We got what we wanted."

"We wanted thirteen consecutive life sentences," Stiles corrected him, keeping his hands in his lap behind his raised knees to hide the way his hands clenched into fists. "What we got was fifteen years and the possibility of parole. It's bullshit."

"It's something."

"It's not _enough_ ," Stiles said. "After everything she did? She'll be out by the time she's fifty! Where's the justice in that?"

"Stiles."

Derek's right hand came to rest on his knee, squeezing. His eyebrows were pinched together, forehead lined, and all of Stiles' indignant words died on his tongue in the space of a heartbeat. He removed his toes from their cozy hiding place so he could shimmy forward to drape his legs across Derek's lap. Derek obligingly uncrossed his own legs to make room, letting Stiles make himself at home half on top of him and leaning into the fingers that wound themselves into the soft hair at the nape of his neck.

"I'm sorry, pumpkin," Stiles said. "I'm not making this any easier, am I?"

Derek wrapped an arm around his waist and tried to smile. "It's okay. You mean well, and you're right, I'm just— I'm not up for righteous fury today. Today I'll take what I can get, and what I've got is fifteen years that I don't have to look over my shoulder."

"And that's something," Stiles echoed.

"Maybe she'll be out in a few years," Derek said with a shrug that did nothing to make his unconcerned tone convincing, "and maybe Gerard is still calling the shots from a golf course somewhere instead of behind bars where he should be, but that's for later. Someday things will be better or they'll be worse, and we have no control over that. In the meantime, things are okay. Okay will get us through."

Stiles couldn't help but smile at that. It was something he and Scott had been saying for years, the simple saying he had made up that had gotten Scott through the tough years right after he had been bitten. That Derek had picked it up and found comfort in it was something that made Stiles glow with pride and love.

And things _were_ okay. The country as a whole was sort of a mess at the moment, but it was the sort of backsliding that precipitated forward motion, the worst of the storm before it broke and showed clear sky. Maybe it was slow and jerky and painful, but progress was being made, not just on a political level but on a personal one too. For all that it had taken two years for them to even make it through the trial, Kate had finally been sentenced. It wasn't quite what they were hoping for, but she had been officially convicted and now maybe the Hales could find some peace. Maybe Derek could find peace.

He was doing better. The first few months after Kate's arrest had been difficult for him, to say the least. Seeing her again, having all of his previous traumas dredged up and rubbed in his face, had fucked Derek up bad enough that he had had to put the whole romance thing on a backburner for a while and focus on getting his head on straight again. Stiles had supported that wholeheartedly, dedicating himself to being the best damn friend and support system he could possibly be for as long as Derek needed that.

It hadn't been easy. They had known it wouldn't be, but the projections were nothing like the reality of it. In those first few weeks, Stiles had genuinely regretted pushing for Derek to take everything public; the media reaction had been immediate and nothing short of sensational, completely overwhelming, and made even worse by the backlash of contradictory social media movements. #Justice4Cassie had trended for seven months in support of Derek's little human cousin, the only Hale mentioned by name in the recording that had been released to the public. The recording that Stiles' friend Danny had leaked in every possible format on every possible platform, more than once, to make absolutely sure that pieces of it couldn't be taken out of context or twisted to suit the anti-weres' agenda.

By now things had calmed down a bit; two years on and there had been other scandals, other riots, other names to add to the list of casualties caused by specism and its proponents. Some people had gotten bored and moved on, others pushed for change in Derek's name just as Stiles had known they would. Others still had pushed back, lashing out not only at Derek but at every werewolf they encountered. The Hale massacre had polarized the entire nation and they weren't quite sure yet if the ripples were fading out or building to a tsunami, but the spotlight on Derek himself had dimmed, at least for the moment.

It helped that he didn't have to interact with the public too much. He had an official twitter account, a page on facebook, and a website that Danny had set them up with, but he usually let Stiles post to them on his behalf. He tried to avoid giving interviews or making personal appearances, though he couldn't forgo them entirely, and he spent the majority of his time holed up in their apartment.

A few months ago, he had insisted that he get a job, citing the need to _do something or go insane_ , but finding one hadn't been easy. Derek didn't have a degree or any job training, hadn't even graduated from high school before going underground, and honestly it just wasn't safe for him to be in public spaces. There were too many specist assholes out there who would take a shot at him for the sake of finishing the Argents' oh-so-noble work in ridding the world of mutts and dogs.

Now Derek worked nights at a library, sorting and reshelving books when no one else was around to hassle him. He liked the work, said it was soothing and kept him from losing his mind, but he didn't really need the money. The insurance payout from the fire had been tied up in a bunch of red tape and bylaws at first, but the DA had swooped in to take up the case; DA Whittemore had become a huge werewolf rights proponent practically overnight when his son had been bitten a few years back, and he managed to get Derek every penny of every relative's life insurance policy, all without charging him a thing. Derek was sitting on a small fortune.

Yet here he was in a tiny, one bedroom apartment with Stiles, sitting on his ratty dime-store sofa with his dinged up, three year old iPhone in hand. And Stiles loved him. God, he loved Derek Hale more than he had the words for. So he just took Derek's face in his hands, thumbs stroking along the line of his beard-fuzzy jaw, and said, "Kiss?"

Derek gave him a smile, small and sweet, and nodded. Stiles kept it quick and gentle, sensing that Derek wasn't up for anything involved at the current time, but it was more than enough to leech all the tension from his muscles and leave him sated and relaxed. He pressed one more quick kiss to the corner of Derek's mouth and then nuzzled into his neck instead, nose nudged up in the soft spot behind Derek's ear. With his arm around Derek's shoulders and Derek's arm around his waist, it was a very comfortable position and Stiles was seriously considering just going to sleep right there until he finally caught sight of what Derek was looking at on that phone of his.

"Derek!"

Even though he was obviously caught, Derek still tried to hide the phone, but Stiles managed to snatch it out of his hand before he could get rid of the evidence. He scrolled through the page, his stomach turning over at some of the vile things that jumped out at him even with just a cursory look.

"Jesus, Derek. What have we said about reading the comments section on literally anything ever?"

Derek sighed, and it was no wonder he looked so pale and unhappy if _this_ is what he had been doing for the last however long he had been doing it. "That it is...unwise," he said.

"I think _downright dangerous_ is what we settled on last time," Stiles shot back as he skimmed back up to the top of the page. "And god, you had to pick this article, didn't you?"

They couldn't prosecute Kate for the statutory rape, the statute of limitations having long since passed, but that didn't mean nobody talked about it. People talked and talked and talked and every fucking thing they said made Stiles see red. And these comments were the worst of it, all the meninist neckbeards saying that Derek should have been _grateful_ to get laid at sixteen, that Kate was hot and he obviously wanted it, calling him names and finding every way they could to tear him down.

Stiles discarded the tab and found two more just like it and another with more specist garbage, closing all of those too with overly aggressive flicks of his thumb before tossing the phone onto the floor and out of Derek's reach. Then he fixed Derek with the most disapproving look he could muster. A muscle in Derek's jaw jumped as he chewed on his tongue, avoiding Stiles' eye for as long as he could before he cracked.

"I know!" he said finally, frustration thick in his voice. "I know, okay? I shouldn't. I should just ignore it, but that's...it's not easy sometimes."

Stiles shifted around until he could face Derek properly, straddling his thighs. Derek's hands landed on his hips, making sure he didn't fall over backwards like he did that one time they never mention for the sake of his dignity.

"I know it's not, honey bear," he said, "but ignoring it isn't the same as not actively seeking it out. You can't go looking for this stuff, Derek. It isn't good for you."

Derek let out a groan, leaning forward until he could rest his forehead against Stiles' chest. "I know," he muttered into Stiles' shirt, tugging at his belt loops to get him to shuffle closer. "But it's all out there. And I know it's there, and I hate knowing it's there but not knowing _exactly_ what's there, you know?"

Stiles petted his hair, the strands soft and silky between his fingers. "But that's not _all_ that's there," he said. "The comments sections are full of mouth-breathers, the lowest of the low always trolling and looking for fights. If you want to go looking for what people think of you, look on the forums instead. They're full of werewolves and survivors of abuse and victims of hate crimes, and every last one of them looks up to you. I know you don't feel like it most of the time, but you're a hero to them. And they're the ones that matter. They're the ones who're gonna make a difference someday. You hear me?"

Derek nodded, his head bumping into Stiles' chin. Stiles poked him in the side again, more insistent than before, until he squirmed and made a grumpy noise of protest.

"I said, do you hear me? Come on, Hunkules, verbalize for me."

Derek pulled back abruptly to look at him in utter confusion. "Hunkules?" he asked, mouth twisting around the strange word.

"That's what I said."

"Is that supposed to be 'Hercules'?"

Stiles shook his head, scooching closer until he could wrap both arms around Derek's neck. "Mm, nope. Pretty sure I got it right the first time. It's like Hercules, but hunkier."

Derek just shook his head for a minute, clearly exasperated, but then he laughed. "Where do you even get these?" he asked. "Almost a year and a half and you're still coming up with new ones."

Stiles did research, scouring the internet far and wide for the most obscure terms of endearment. He had a list, one that he'd been adding to on a regular basis ever since he realized that Kate had ruined all the regular pet names for them. The first time Stiles had accidentally called him "sweetheart," Derek had had a panic attack, unable to get Kate's voice out of his head. Sweetheart, baby, babe, and especially sweetie: all off limits. Even just "Der" could be a little iffy depending on where Derek's head was, so Stiles had to get creative. The pet names he used were silly and ridiculous, but they were safe and they almost always earned him a smile.

Stiles smiled back now, helpless to fight it. He traced a finger over the curve of Derek's cheek, the dimple and the newly acquired laugh lines that he was proud to say he was responsible for. "I just like keeping you on your toes."

Derek kissed him, slow and lingering. "Never a dull moment with you," he murmured, lips still brushing against Stiles because neither of them wanted to pull away. "You know I love you, right?"

He asked that often. There were still times when Derek closed off so thoroughly that even Stiles couldn't reach him, times when he got angry and pushed him away, times when his anxiety made him sick and nearly sent him running for fear of Stiles getting hurt just by associating with him. But he always came back and asked that question. He said it was just to make sure that Stiles never forgot, that he never had the opportunity to doubt it. Stiles thought it was because Derek hadn't had the chance to say it to his family before he had lost them, and he didn't want to make the same mistake this time around.

"I know, big guy," Stiles whispered. "And you know I love you too. More than anything."

With another kiss, this one no more than a chaste press of lips, Stiles clambered off Derek's lap and onto his feet, holding out a hand for Derek to take.

"Now, we are going to go take a long nap," he said, tone leaving no room for argument. "You are going to be the little spoon and I am going to cuddle the fuck out of you. And then we'll get up and put out that statement of yours before you have to go to work. Sound good?"

Derek took his hand, but he didn't pull. Instead he stroked his fingers along the back of it, turned it over to press his lips against Stiles' palm. Then he smiled up at Stiles, eyes shining, and said, "Very good."

Maybe things weren't perfect, but with Derek's hand in his and all their worries put on hold for a few hours, things were pretty okay. Better than okay, even. And that would be more than enough to get them through anything the world might throw at them next.

* * *

 **Trigger warnings: specism, victim blaming via internet comments, mentions of panic attacks.**


End file.
